I interviewed Sabina Sattar, producer ofSummer Scars, when I visited the set in August 2006.

Was this something that Julian Richards brought to you? How do you know him?
“This is something Julian brought to me. I’ve never worked with him before; I’ve produced short films before. I met up with Julian, he was looking for a new independent producer, had a chat with him, got on really well - and a few months later he said, ‘Would you like to produce?’ So here I am.”

Had you seen his earlier films?
“I saw The Last Horror Movie which was really good, really cool. It had some really dark moments and Kevin is a really cool actor. So I was really looking forward to doing this. I’ve never really worked on a horror thing before. I know Julian’s reputation. He didn’t tell me anything about the script so when I read it I was pleasantly surprised. He said it was dark but you really got to know the kids in the script and you really wanted them to get out of that situation. And I’m glad it’s a happy... well, I don’t want to give it away! I felt: yeah, good for the kids!”

Where has the funding for this come from?
“It’s part-financed by the Arts Council of Wales and by several independent production companies, so half and half really.”

Have you been involved in assembling cast and crew?
“Yes, pretty much so. Julian had been holding casting auditions for months before I came on board. I came along at the tale end of the auditions and I saw Jonathan who plays Paul. I saw his audition and I saw Chris who plays Ben, his audition, and Ciaran who plays Bingo.”

The characters are meant to be about fourteen.
“That’s right. Ciaran who plays Bingo is eighteen but fortunately he’s got a very young-looking face and it just turned out that he was the best actor for the role. We tried, Julian especially tried looking for someone of that age to play that character. But they weren’t coming up to the quality of performance that Ciaran can give.”

There must be legal matters relating to working with a young cast.
“That’s right. You’re only allowed to work kids under sixteen for seven and a half to eight hours; there’s a bit of leeway. There’s a chaperone for those kids at all times on set and they call the shots. They can give us a little bit of leeway but usually when they say, ‘Kids go home’ - they go home.”

Having read the script, there’s a scene towards the end where the kids have to strip off. Obviously you won’t show anything but that’s going to be possibly problematical for the censor. Do you think there’s any danger of that?
“It’s dependant on how it’s shot, obviously. And it’s very sensitively shot. There’s always going to be people who say ‘You shouldn’t show this’ or whatever, but it’s an artistic expression of somebody’s work. So whilst you have to be sensitive to the issues, you’ve still got to get the film shot in the way that it was written. It’s kind of a balancing act and hopefully we’ll have achieved that and allowed the real intent of the script to come out.”

What sort of rating do you think you’ll get?
“I think 15 would be good. There’s nothing really violent or gory, there’s no drugs or anything. It’s very much a coming of age film, really, so apart from those few incidents that you mentioned, it should get away with a 15.”

So how has production been going so far? Are you on schedule?
“Are we on schedule? No is the short answer. Obviously there’s trouble when you’re filming completely on location. We’ve been unfortunate with the weather, very unfortunate. We were flooded out yesterday on the set. Fortunately we’ve managed to channel all the water away and we had other areas that we could film so we didn’t waste the day but we didn’t get to shoot all we were supposed to shoot.

“Also there’s been various sound issues. It’s always the way: when you check out a location it’s perfectly silent as a graveyard but when you come in with the cameras every Tom, Dick and Harry’s got their lawnmowers out. Construction work going on, loudly hammering. It’s one of those things and you just have to work around it. That has made us drop scenes and stuff, but we’ve got light days coming ahead so we’re hoping to pick those up, weather permitting.”

When will the film be ready for viewing?
“I think our delivery day is the end of October so hopefully by then.”

Are you hoping for a theatrical release?
“It’s part of the requirements that we provide a theatrical print. Still, obviously we don’t know yet whether it will get a theatrical release but we will be providing a theatrical print.”

Director: Maurice Elvey
Writers: D William Woolf, George Barraud, Reginald Long
Producer: KC Alexander
Cast: Leslie Banks, Mackenzie Ward, Kay Walsh
Country: UK
Year of release: 1939
Reviewed from: UK TV broadcast

Some reference sources describe this as a tale of naval espionage and while that's not completely untrue it is really just a whodunnit murder mystery set in a naval training establishment. It also has one of the least satisfying endings I have ever seen with a resolution for which 'half-hearted' would seem to be hyperbolic praise. Nevertheless I was very excited to catch this film when the BBC broadcast it in 2005 and I strongly recommend it to you, should the chance to see it ever come your way. We will get to the whys and wherefores later.

The story is set in and around the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, filmed on location with large numbers of Naval cadets as extras. When the base's captain, Captain Arthurs, fails to show for the regular inspection parade, he is discovered murdered. The only clues are a few drops of blood on a windowsill and some footprints in a flowerbed. As it happens, Arthurs was about to retire and his successor, Captain Hyde (Leslie Banks: The Tunnel, The Man Who Knew Too Much, perhaps best known to genre fans as Count Zaroff in The Most Dangerous Game), arrives that same day from Singapore to prepare for transferal of duty.

No-one can imagine why someone would want to off a nice old duffer like Arthurs, but it seems that a newspaper had wrongly reported Hyde as already being in command so the murderer might have thought his victim was Hyde - who has some information on 'secret minefields' laid by the enemy. Produced in 1939 before the outbreak of war, the script studiously avoids mentioning Germany but there is an assumption that the murderer must be 'a foreigner' and there are, interestingly, several references to what will happen "during the war", demonstrating that hostilities were now considered a fait accompli.

Arriving at the base just as the gates are locked, Hyde's taxi nearly knocks down a rather louche young chap named Newton Howells (Mackenzie Ward: the 1948 Monkey's Paw and an uncredited role in The Two Face of Dr Jekyll) whose presence is explained by flashing papers which identify him, we eventually learn, as an agent of the British Secret Service.

Spying on all those from an astronomical observatory on the hills above the base is Alison Deaver, played by Kay Walsh who was Nancy in David Lean's Oliver Twist and was also in Stage Fright, Vice Versa, Gilbert Harding Speaks of Murder and, later, A Study in Terror and Hammer's The Witches. Alison uses her father's telescopes to watch the strapping young cadets and officers, especially Lieutenant Street (Peter Shaw, who allegedly played the tiny devil created by Dr Praetorius in Bride of Frankenstein!), a handsome but humourless young man with whom Alison is stepping out. Professor Deaver (the great Kynaston Reeves: the 1932 version of The Lodger, Four-sided Triangle, Fiend Without a Face, Uncle Nicholas in The Forsyte Saga) is a typical movie scientist, buried in a notebook and paying only vague attention to what is going on around him. Since his wife died, he and Alison have been looked after by Margaret Howells - played as slightly potty comic relief by Ellen Pollock (Non-Stop New York, Spare a Copper and, much later, in Horror Hospital) - who hasn't seen her brother for 25 years. When Newton arrives, Alison is quite taken by him and the attraction seems to be mutual. Also in the mix is Captain Hyde's son Philip (Simon Lack, who was in Nigel Kneale's The Creature and much later faced another creature in Trog), a cadet at the college, who breaks the news to his father that he wants to leave the Navy and go into business.

The plot, such as it is, hinges on Captain Hyde asking Philip to borrow a car and pick him up from nearby Churston railway station. Philip drives his father down to Churston Cove where a small boat takes the Captain out to a Royal Navy launch. His suspicions of 'secret minefields' have proved correct. There are lots of mines attached to the sea-bed (we see a deep sea diver's costume onboard the launch) which are linked by an electrical system. If British ships moor in the cove, a 'foreigner' can press a single button somewhere which will cause all these mines to float to the surface which will either destroy or blockade the British fleet; I'm not sure on that point, but whatever, it's bad news.

This technological-military innovation is barely even a McGuffin here. I don't know how credible such a device would have been in 1939 but it's not really enough to tip the film into borderline science-fiction, unlike the engine-destroying ray in the same year's Q Planes or the radio-controlled tank in Walter Forde's 1929 feature Would You Believe It?

An 'unidentified aeroplane' bombs the launch, by which I mean the Navy can't identify it and neither can I - what sorts of twin-engined monoplanes were in use with the RAF in mid-1939? Captain Hyde survives and is picked up by a fishing boat but he has completely lost his memory. The crux of the story is that Hyde swore Philip to secrecy about this brief car journey from Churston station to the cove (which, to be honest, it looks like he could have walked). Interrogated by Commander Herbert (Cecil Parker: The Man Who Changed His Mind, The Lady Vanishes, The Man in the White Suit, Circus of Fear, Oh! What a Lovely War, but probably best known as Claude in The Lady Killers), who is now acting Captain, and an officer from Naval Intelligence, Philip refuses to say anything about the lift he gave his father, even after a comedy relief station porter is brought in to attest that he saw the two of them on that day. Philip still won't say where he took his father to, but given that Captain Hyde was picked up floating in the sea near Churston it's hardly a head-scratcher. Nobody seems bothered at all about the other sailors on that ill-fated launch.

The 'mystery', if it can be called that, is how did the enemy know that Captain Hyde was on that particular launch and can Hyde's memory be retrieved in order to obtain details of these secret minefields that he discovered. Philip eventually admits to having told secret serviceman Howells who had promised to help him move to New Zealand. Lieutenant Street races over to the Deavers' house (a large Elizabethan manse with a croquet lawn, and a state-of-the-art observatory of course) to find that Margaret and her brother have traveled separately to visit Margaret's relatives in Exeter. When a taxi pulls up and disgorges Margaret who can't understand why her 'brother' failed to show, it is clear that Howells is an enemy agent on the run. He is picked up boarding a ferry and his identity revealed as 'Kapitan Mueller', the closest that the film gets to fingering Germany as the enemy. Asked how he obtained the identity papers of the real, presumably deceased, Newton Howells, Mueller simply responds, "Perhaps you can work that out using your Naval Intelligence," which is a bit of a cop-out.

Meanwhile, attempts to retrieve Captain Hyde's memory come to nothing until the sound of a biplane flying over the base causes him to relive those few moments when the other plane made repeated bombing runs across the launch (a scene achieved using remarkably good back-projection, it must be said) and when he recognises his son it's clear that his memory has returned and the Royal Navy is safe.

Alison is reunited with Lieutenant Street; Philip, who has realised that he wants to stay in the Navy after all, is sent out to rejoin the inspection parade; as the band plays the National Anthem the camera pans to a painting of King George VI on the Commander's wall; and the film finishes with a picture of Nelson and the caption, 'England expects that every man this day will do his duty.' (The opening credits play over paintings of Napoleonic naval battles and this broadcast was possibly inspired by the bicentenary of the Battle of Trafalgar a few days earlier, although it may also have been something of a tribute to Kay Walsh, coming only six weeks after her death at age 93.)

This all makes the film sound more complicated and exciting than it is, though for the most part it's an enjoyable, jolly romp. There is also a red herring subplot in Professor Deaver's odd behaviour: he partakes of late night walks and cryptic phone conversations, and somebody points out that he is actually a foreigner. But it turns out that he is secretly planning to marry a glamourpuss named Miss Day, seen briefly on the other end of a telephone. To the film's credit, the comic relief never intrudes or seems out of place and is occasionally actually amusing. The station porter is played with a bug-eyed, moustachioed eccentricity that puts one in mind of James Finlayson and Margaret Howells has one terrific line when Lieutenant Street asks her if she is sure that the man calling himself Newton Howells really is her long-lost brother. "Oh yes," she says, "I distinctly recall there being two of us."

But the development and especially the resolution of the weak plot is just not there, as you can see. The film is of interest to Naval historians for its footage of pre-war (just) cadets parading at the Royal Naval College although it's a shame that in a film about the Royal Navy we never see a single ship. The only craft on view are the launch that gets bombed, the fishing boat that picks up Hyde and the Dartmouth estuary ferry. There are a few nice shots of a GWR locomotive and carriages and some nice old 1930s cars, plus footage shot from the ground of two planes flying over. But no ships.

So why, you are wondering, is this film of such interest? The answer is: it's in colour. Sons of the Sea was the first British feature film ever shot using a single-strip colour process, in this case a system known as 'Dufaycolor'. (The company which developed the system was a UK-US collaboration - although inventor Louis Dufay was French - hence the American spelling.) Four years previously the process had been used for two sequences in Radio Parade of 1935, but this was its first use for an entire film. Only the opening logo of 'Grand National Pictures', the film's US distributor, is in black and white.

Technicolor at this time was still a three-strip process, meaning that the image was split into its three primary colours which were recorded on three strips of negative film, later combined to create a full-colour print. This required, as you can imagine, a pretty large and cumbersome camera. Dufaycolor got round this by using special negative film that carried rows of microscopic filters, enabling all three colours to be recorded on one strip of film. This meant that Dufaycolor films could be shot using existing cameras and there is some nice fluid camera movement in this film that simply wouldn't be possible with a Technicolor camera of the same vintage.

The Centre for British Film and Television Studies at Birkbeck University in London has a rather scholarly essay on the use of Dufaycolor in non-fiction films, which is where it was mostly featured. Unfortunately the war put paid to all further development of Dufaycolor movies in the UK and although it was used for a few years afterwards, it had pretty much died out by the 1950s.

It must be said that the colour in the print shown by the BBC (which had the odd scratch and jump but was for the most part in very good nick) was outstanding. The blue of the sea, the green of the field, the yellow of Alison's dress - all amazingly vivid, albeit more muted than one might be used to from later colour films, more like a picture postcard. The beautiful West Country weather certainly must have helped matters. The colours reminded me a little of the ones you see on those Hammer publicity stills which were actually black and white photos coloured by hand.

There is no attempt here to foreground the colour process or to let it dominate the story. In fact there is a lot of black and white; the Naval cadet uniforms of this era are black jackets with white trousers and white caps, and Howells is first seen wearing an all-white suit. There is very little contrast within the blacks, but there is some surprisingly effective day-for-night photography. Because of the nature of the process, almost a sort of primitive digitisation, the picture is not terribly sharp or crisp, but the colours make up for any softness in the image. There may not be much of a plot but this is a wonderful film to watch, a real feast for the eyes.

The rather charming directorial credit is 'Sole direction: Maurice Elvey' (High Treason, The Lodger, The Tunnel) but the writing credits are typically complex for the age. This British Consolidated Pictures Production is ‘by’ Gerald Elliott (The Frog, Return of the Frog) and Maurice Elvey, but the ‘scenario’ is credited to D William Woolf and George Barraud (also an actor - he was in Charlie Chan in London) while Reginald Long (who wrote, and starred in, the 1936 borderline horror The Avenging Hand) is credited with ‘dialogue’. I wonder whether the film might actually be based on a stage play as it’s awfully talky and if you conflated the Devears’ observatory and sitting room into one set, then used a cover-all office for every room in the college, you could do it on stage fairly easily. This would explain why parts make little sense or seem utterly perfunctory (for example, the Miss Day subplot), if chunks of the story were cut out in order to make room for all the parade footage and other exterior shots, while keeping the running time under 80 minutes. There are two Doctor Watsons in the cast: a very young Nigel Stock (The Dambusters, The Lost Continent) plays Philip’s chum Rudd and would later star in the 1960s TV version of Sherlock Holmes opposite Peter Cushing, while Ian Fleming (not the James Bond author!) had already played Watson in The Sleeping Cardinal, The Missing Rembrandt, The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes and Silver Blaze. Also credited on screen are Charles Eaton and Robert Field.

Cinematographer Eric Cross also lit The Mystery of the Marie Celeste and handled the underwater photography on little-seen 1934 British monster movie The Secret of the Loch; editor Dug (sic) Myers went on to cut Blood of the Vampire; sound recordist Leo Wilkins worked on The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes, The Cruel Sea and The Lady Killers; ‘interior settings’ (ie. art direction) is by Jack Maxted (Diamonds are Forever, Jason and the Argonauts, Warlords of Atlantis); make-up artist HF Fletcher is presumably Harry Fletcher (Curse of the Fly, The Earth Does Screaming). The other credited crew are production manager Louis London and assistant director Fred V Merrick (Elvey’s younger brother) who is miscredited as FW Merrick.

‘For Dufaycolor’, says the credits: ‘Adrian Klein, John New, Joan Bridge’. Klein (who is incorrectly listed as ‘Adrian Clyne’ on the Inaccurate Movie Database and elsewhere) worked for an even more obscure process, Gasparcolor, for whom he made several short animated films and one short documentary, before becoming official spokesman for Dufraycolor. A former Army Major, he published an extraordinary book called Coloured Light: An Art Medium in 1926 (reprinted as Colour Music: The Art of Light eleven years later) which suggested that music and colour should be inextricably linked in performance; he also wrote one of the first books on colour cinematography in 1936. Joan Bridge defected to Technicolor after the war, working on Blithe Spirit, A Matter of Life and Death, Genevieve and Ben Hur, eventually putting her colour skills to use as costume designer on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Half a Sixpence and other pictures. I can’t find anything on John New.

Possibly the most fascinating career that encompases this film is that of South African cameraman Ted Moore. After serving in the RAF film crew he working on such high profile movies as The African Queen and Genevieve before making the natural progression from camera operator to cinematographer in the mid-1950s and racking up a CV which includes Cockleshell Heroes, The Gamma People, The Day of the Triffids, Dr No (and six other Bonds), Psychomania, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, Clash of the Titans, A Man for All Seasons (for which he won an Oscar), Orca - Killer Whale and The Martian Chronicles!

For the film itself, MJS rating: D+
For the technical aspects: MJS rating: A

Director: Richard Mansfield
Writer: Richard Mansfield
Producers: Daniel and Richard Mansfield
Cast: Katy Vans, Rachel Dale, Darren Munn
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.mansfielddark.com

Richard Mansfield continues to redefine the limits of contemporary British horror with his latest feature. Mansfield, regular readers may recall, is the creator of feature-length shadow puppet fairy tale Wolfskin (plus numerous similar shorts) and historical LGBT spook story The Secret Path. For The Mothman Curse, he has taken the idea of lo-fi film-making to extremes and shot the bulk of the film on a CCTV camera purchased for a tenner from Woolworths. It makes for a unique viewing experience.

The actual plot is, as with Mansfield’s other features, somewhat nebulous. Rachel (Rachel Dale) and Katy (Katy Vans, who voiced a couple of Richard's shadow animations) are friends who have landed a job sorting and cataloguing a massive collection of film publicity material at London’s Cinema Museum.

Now, I had not previously heard of the Cinema Museum, possibly because it’s not so much a museum as an archive. You can’t just turn up and look around, though they do hold events. It’s basically a vast collection of stuff relating to cinema and cinemas. Including not just posters and lobby cards and the like but also commissionaires’ uniforms, popcorn kiosks, no smoking signs and all manner of ephemera. There are boxes and files stacked everywhere. The chance to explore something like that would be any film fan’s dream.

Katy and Rachel are clearly not film fans per se, which is probably a good thing because otherwise they would never get any work done. Rachel knows Stephen (Stephen Glover), proprietor of the museum who lets them in and sets them to work among the filing cabinets.

A prologue and flashbacks (dream sequences?) shot on colour 8mm film show Rachel at the seaside (St Bees in Cumbria to be precise) where she found something on a beach. Possibly an antique whistle. This has brought some sort of demonic entity with it which now starts skulking around the Cinema Museum, haunting not only Rachel but increasingly Katy too.

That précis vastly oversimplifies and massively underplays the nature of this spooky and disturbing feature film. The ‘mothman’ (played by Mansfield’s husband Daniel) is seen only as a dark, humanoid figure with glowing eyes and two points sticking up from its head like the ears on a Batman cowl. Mansfield’s skill lies in the subtle ways he inserts the mothman into the film, sometimes glimpsed by one of the women (though never both), sometimes seem only by us.

Other elements are used to gradually ramp up the spookiness, including mobile telephone rings and a mysterious knocking on the door. There are scenes at the women’s homes (with Darren Munn as Katy’s husband) and there are shots inside and outside the museum (which is based in an old Victorian workhouse where, coincidentally, young Charles Chaplin and his mother were briefly residents).

The use of the CCTV camera, with its very grainy, monochrome footage adds immeasurably to the tense atmosphere of the film. There being no viewfinder on the thing, Mansfield had to shoot the whole affair ‘blind’, trusting that he was pointing the camera in the right direction. In the night-time scenes, a single circle of light hovers in front of the lens, panning as the camera pans. The effect is extremely spooky. Sometimes Mansfield plays about a bit in post, freezing the image, zooming in – which of course only adds to the graininess.

Now at this point in the review, something may be niggling at the back of your mind. Something you read a couple of paragraphs back. Something about finding a whistle on a beach. If I tell you that The Mothman Curse was previously entitled Who is Coming, maybe that’s another clue. All right, I’ll tell you. The answer is ‘MR James’. And the question is: who or what is the biggest influence on this film?

You may recall that in ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad’, a man finds a whistle on a beach, engraved with a Latin motto which translates as “Who is this who is coming?” – and indeed the phrase “who is coming” is heard quietly on the soundtrack of this film. Mansfield is a huge fan of the old BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas, most of which were Jamesian adaptations, and the influence of Montague Rhodes James seeps throughout The Mothman Curse. It’s in the prosaic, very English ordinariness of the characters and their domestic lives, but it’s also in the cramped, somewhat chaotic, dusty rooms and corridors of the Cinema Museum itself, redolent of the university or church archives and libraries which so often featured in James’ stories. It’s certainly there in the don’t-look-behind-you, shivers-down-the-spine creepiness of the situation and the narrative, which is far more disturbing than a simple ghostly haunting.

The film was actually shot back in 2013, before Wolfskin or The Secret Path, as Owlman – Richard presumably later decided that a mothman was scarier – and carries a 2014 copyright date. Wild Eye Releasing put the film out on DVD/VOD in April 2015 with a sleeve that can’t in all honesty, be said to bear any resemblance whatsoever to any aspect of the film. The character of the owlman/mothman was first used by Mansfield in 2013 in his 90-second animation There’s Something at the End of My Bed which was submitted to Virgin Media Shorts and is included on the Wild Eye disc. A second short on the disc, You Suck, isn’t a vampire film but instead a shadow puppet version of the story of Suck-a-Thumb (archly narrated by Daniel under his pre-married named of Daniel Marlowe).

Bizarrely, the US disc seems to have been pipped to the post, by just a few days, by an Argentian release entitled La Maldicion del Hombre Mariposa. If this image is accurate and untampered with, the back of the sleeve features not only unrelated photos but also the credit block for the Hollywood movie Maps to the Stars! But it does have the Mothman Curse synopsis in Spanish on there too...

Daniel Mansfield’s gay vampire film Drink Me (produced by Richard, and with Darren Munn in the cast) was released around the same time as The Mothman Curse, and another feature Video Killer (also with Munn) is in post. Meanwhile, at time of writing, the ever busy Mr Mansfield is currently working with shadow puppets again, adapting MR James’ story ‘Count Magnus’.

The Mothman Curse won’t be to everybody’s taste, and is almost certainly going to generate some negative reviews from disappointed punters suckered in by Wild Eye’s packaging, but for MR James fans and anyone else who appreciates something genuinely spooky, it’s very much worth tracking down.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Richard Anthony Dunford
Writer: Richard Anthony Dunford
Producers: Richard Anthony Dunford, Mercedes Amezola Artola, Daniel Vallecillo
Cast: Tom Clear, Lewis Saunderson, Karl Kennedy-Williams
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: povhorrormovie.com

A few weeks ago I had the misfortune to watch Day of the Mummy, a cheapo monster movie which took ‘found footage’ to a new level by showing everything from the main character’s point of view. The conceit was that he was wearing some fake spectacles incorporating a small camera.

Well, P.O.V. takes that idea one stage further, dispensing with the camera and simply telling the story of the film solely through the central character’s eyes. By, presumably, requiring the actor to wear some fake spectacles incorporating a small camera. Actually I get the impression that Tom Clear may have had the camera atop his head, as his eyeline seems above that of his friends. Or maybe he’s just very tall.

Anyway, you can imagine how my heart sank at the thought of another ‘found footage’ style British horror film, after sitting through The Mirror and Dark Vision and Hungerford and oh so many others, right back to Vampire Diary and The Zombie Diaries and The Last Horror Movie. There’s nothing new or interesting to do with this idea.

Or so I thought.

Clear (Eve’s Demons) plays Zack, a young man recently dumped by his girlfriend Ramona (Sophie Flack). His friends have decided to cheer him up with a big party, taking advantage of an empty building which is currently being done up by Zack’s mate, builder Mackenzie (Lewis Saunderson: Torn: A Shockyoumentary). The property was previously an old people’s home so it’s large with many rooms and corridors. Lots of identikit twentysomethings turn up to drink beer, dance and talk vacuous rubbish.

This first half of the film is admittedly very well done. It is, perforce, a series of very long takes with just a few invisible edits, harking back structurally all the way to Hitchcock’s Rope. The POV conceit is maintained throughout and never breaks or wavers. The cast acquit themselves very well. The lighting and sound are adroitly handled. But, ultimately, we’re spending 40 minutes hanging around at a party full of young people we don’t know. Maybe that’s interesting for twentysomething viewers but this old fart was just bored. I’ve got no time for young people, even ones like this who aren’t particularly obnoxious.

There is one exemption to the general lack of obnoxiousness, and that’s Zack’s brother Sam (Karl Kennedy-Williams), a belligerent, arrogant, misogynist dickhead who thinks he’s the life of the party, when actually it’s a relief for both characters and audience any time he’s in another part of the house. Still, at least Sam has a character; most of the others are just bodies and faces. Mackenzie is the other character who actually has a character, a nicely nuanced performance by Saunderson which paints the lad as a reasonable, sensible, supportive friend who nevertheless fits in as one of the lads. We also meet Sam’s lary, drunken sister Tash (Sarah Harkins) and unsubtle Lizzy (Tuula Costelloe having a whale of a time), a sparkly-eyed sex poppet who is determined to grab herself a slice of newly single Zack.

About half an hour in, Mackenzie recounts the spooky history of the building, which at least reaffirms that this is a horror film. Then around the halfway mark, Zack – and hence you and I – starts to see weird visions. As he dances with his friends, some of their faces start to become bloody or scary.

Shortly before this, we saw Zack persuaded to take some unspecified drug provided by his brother, so if there was meant to be any doubt or uncertainty about the reality of what he’s seeing… well, there’s none. He’s taken some drugs, and now he’s seeing scary things. Silly fucker.

This however is where the POV conceit actually works. In a regular film, we would repeatedly cut from the reality of what is happening – the reactions of Mackenzie, Sam, Lizzy and others as Zack starts tripping badly – to what the guy believes is happening. But here we’re firmly inside Zack’s head and all we see is what he sees. Or at least, thinks he’s seeing.

Writer-director Richard Anthony Dunford does a fine job of racking up the horrors, hinting at the reality behind them without ever departing from his central idea. Things take a turn for the worse after Lizzy gets Zack into bed, and then things just get more and more awful. Earlier in the film one of Zack’s mates showed him an automatic pistol in a box in an upstairs room, a foreshadowing so obvious that the box may as well have had ‘Property of A Chekhov’ written on the side. Once Zack has located this, the film becomes unavoidably influenced by first-person shoot’em-up games as he prowls through the corridors and hallways, scary folk jumping out in his path.

Essentially, the party-goers now fall into three camps. Some are scary demons, some are corpses (presumably victims of the demons) and those in the dance room are now in evening dress, swaying gently to old-fashioned music while blood drips from their empty eye sockets.

The third act takes us out of the house and into a series of skilfully edited scenes, including some flashbacks or fantasy sequences as Zack’s mind becomes increasingly fractured. It all leads up to a thoroughly satisfying conclusion and a final shock which completely justifies most of what has gone before.

As you can probably tell, the second half of the film is a lot more watchable than the first. All that happens up to the mid-point is that we meet (mostly very briefly) a large number of very similar young people – plus we hear the story of the building’s creepy past. All this could be justified as establishing character except that, as noted, only Sam, Lizzy, Mackenzie and Tash (and Zak of course) have any real depth to their character. P.O.V. runs 85 minutes and it could easily lose 10-15 minutes from the pre-visions part of the story, so that the nightmare kicks in at the end of act one rather than halfway through act two.

But that’s where Dunford has hobbled himself. The use of long, unedited takes, based around obviously very, very carefully managed direction of the actors, means that there’s nowhere he can make the required snips to get that part of the story down to a workable brevity. All that can be done is for reviewers like Yours Truly to assure potential watchers that yes, it is worth sitting through all this frankly rather dull scene setting to get to the good stuff.

The supporting cast includes Gil Sutherland (The Invisible Atomic Monsters from Mars), Brigitta Makk (Rock Band vs Vampires), Carey Thring (Seize the Night), Natalie Nelson (Eve’s Demons) and executive producer Christine Hounslow. Tom Clear appears on screen briefly at the start when Zack looks into a mirror.

Jess Heath deigned the gruesome make-up; her previous gigs include Stag Night of the Dead, Colin, Dark Rage and It Never Sleeps. Kate Freeth was the production designer, an absolutely crucial role on a roving camera picture like this, and Lily Knight (It Never Sleeps) designed the costumes.

This is Richard Anthony Dunford’s feature debut following a number of shorts, some of which were horror. He also has a few non-directorial credits including writer on short child abuse drama I Believe in Monsters and editor on the as-yet-unreleased Eve’s Demons. Dunford previously explored the possibilities of the found footage subgenre with Nick and Tara’s Sex Tape, a four minute short (available on Vimeo) starring Tom Clear and with make-up by Mike Peel.

And that’s the final point to make, I think. P.O.V.isn’t‘found footage’. One of the biggest problems with that subgenre is the arbitrary ‘we must film everything’ requirement: the determination of people to hold onto their camera at all times. P.O.V. dispenses with that constraint and thus has a degree of freedom – and creativity – not normally associated with films of this type.

Shot in 2014, P.O.V. had a cast and crew screening in London in August of that year followed by festival screenings in December in Merseyside and Manilla (on Christmas Day!). Its first actual release was a VOD outing courtesy of the good folks at TheHorrorShow.tv in April 2015.

MJS rating: A-

Director: Andrew John
Writer: Andrew John
Producer: Andrew John
Cast: Andrew John, Thomas Lee, Dean Greatbatch
Country: UK
Year of release: 2004
Reviewed from: screener VHS

At 38 minutes this is the longest picture yet from teenage filmmaker Andrew John, whose previous shorts include Dia de los Muertos and 100 Today, Dead Tomorrow. It was shot on video, it stars his mates and it was clearly filmed in and around his home.

And you know what? I really enjoyed this. It doesn’t outstay its welcome, it doesn’t try to reach beyond its grasp, and the two most common faults of amateur film-making - script and sound - both stand up to scrutiny. Granted, it doesn’t entirely make sense but it has convincing characters, entertaining and well-executed gore effects, an imaginative storyline and one brilliant moment which very nearly made me fall off my chair with laughter.

Writer/director/editor/cameraman/executive producer Andrew John stars as Jack, who lives with his older brother Harry (Thomas Lee, aka Tom Rutter, director of Full Moon Massacre) in a comfortable middle-class house. Both the actors and the characters are in their teens; there is no sign or mention of parents, although there is a car on the drive. It’s almost as if this is set in some sort of alternative world where parents don’t exist, which probably wasn’t the intention but is an interesting interpretation if you care to look at things that way.

Jack has daily counselling, for some unspecified reason, from a ‘councillor’ (sic) played by Dean Greatbatch as a porno-watching, money-grabbing bastard with no interest in Jack’s welfare whatsoever. When Jack comes home after being fleeced of thirty quid by this counsellor, he has his wallet stolen by a local yob, but he subsequently finds a Satanic notebook in which he decides to record his feelings. No sooner has he started doing this than he hears that Harry has been killed on his way to the shops (he is told over the phone!). Filled with guilt because Harry had asked him to go down the shops, he had refused and Harry had gone himself, Jack writes ‘Now he’s dead and it’s all my fault’ over and over again, eventually filling all 62 pages of the notebook.

Grieving hysterically in the back garden, Jack falls down a hole, perhaps an old well. I must admit that I didn’t understand this hole. At one point, Jack sees a demonic version of himself appear from it and on another occasion he falls through the hole into an alternative reality where his undead brother chases him with a pistol.

At heart, this is a revenge picture. When the lad who stole Jack’s wallet tries to burgle the house, Jack attacks him with a sledgehammer, then ties him to a chair and lays into him with electric drill and various knives, before literally ripping his guts out. For a no-budget movie, these gore effects are very well done. More importantly, they are shot and edited in such a way as to help disguise their cheapness, not foreground it.

Jack then goes looking for his counsellor, armed with a pistol (I don’t know where he found that). Bursting in on the porno-watching pervert, gun-toting Jack stands in front of him as the counsellor desperately tries to switch off the TV using the remote, leading to the funniest ‘Mexican stand-off’ I have ever seen. For this one scene alone, Andrew John is to be applauded. After a detour in the woods which I didn’t understand, the film culminates with Harry, the yob and the counsellor emerging from the hole as zombies to attack Jack in his own garden.

The director’s passion for film-making, his enthusiasm and his commitment all come across. This is a highly commendable effort from a very promising young filmmaker who could go on to do really great things - by the time he reaches his twenties! Tom Rutter provides the impressive splatter effects which are used just enough to impress without falling into gratuitous silliness. The acting is naturally somewhat variable but John does a great job once his character flips and Greatbatch clearly has a ball as the counsellor. I still don’t understand precisely where the notebook and the hole fit in, but they do at least serve to distinguish the story from a generic revenge fantasy.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Andrew John Rutter
Writer: Andrew John Rutter
Producer: Andrew John Rutter
Cast: Andrew John Rutter, William Stafford, MJ Simpson
Country: UK
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener

Statica is bleak, chilling, disturbing and nightmare-ish - even the bits without me in them.

This is the latest film from Andrew John Rutter who just called himself Andrew John when he made 62 Pages. Among the cast is his brother Thomas Lee Rutter (Mr Blades) who just called himself Thomas Lee when he made Full Moon Massacre. The boys’ mum, Mandy Rutter is in the cast too as well as William Stafford, who played reporter Chester Marwood in Mr Blades, and regular Rutter collaborator DJ Nock.

It was during the production of Tom Rutter’s slasher feature that Andrew asked me if I wouldn’t mind shooting a couple of scenes for his own short film and I was happy to oblige. Newspaper editor Raymond Burns’ office was actually the library of Stourbridge College and a different part of the room was used to represent ‘Statica’, a sort of ... well, I’m not really sure.

I never saw a script for this film, I was just given lines and told where to sit/stand/crawl. The idea (as it was explained to me) is that Statica is a drug which transports the user to a strange place - where I play the manager. One of my lines - “Statica offers.... absolute ... paradise!” - is repeated throughout the 38-minute film and in fact the first image on screen is my ugly mug.

There is some sort of Cronenberg-ian parasite slug that enters Statica at the same time as Andy Rutter’s character and my creepy, slightly bonkers manager character is trying to whack it with my shoe. I recall suggesting that in subsequent shots I should be hopping and then putting my shoe back on although that doesn’t come across terribly well because the picture is so tight on me (probably to disguise the fact that I’m in a library).

Frankly, and at the risk of blowing my own trumpet, I think this is my best screen performance so far and even I find my character creepy in places. It must be good because even Mrs S grudgingly admitted that one of my lines sounded quite good and not “just like you’re saying the words.”

You will notice that I have so far written about my own contribution to the movie rather than really exploring what it’s about. There’s a reason for that. Statica is decidedly non-narrative, an assembly of images and concepts that very effectively creates a druggy ambience on the border between coherence and randomness. Andy Rutter stars as a young man who is overwhelmed by the strain of caring for his bedridden (blind?) mother and by the imposition of his stern father who plays on the boy’s guilt to alleviate his own caring responsibilities. And so the son seeks relief in ever stronger narcotics...

There are some great images here including a stop-motion figure made from newspaper, a talking pile of vomit, a TV set chasing and killing a cat, a skeletal figure pulling its own face off - and the newspaper man recreated in real life. Throughout the nightmare, the young man is followed by, or follows, a mute, faceless, hooded character who seems to be working for me.

While it eschews narrative cohesion, I nevertheless found Statica more coherent and enjoyable than either the shorter Mr Friendly’s Pizza or the longer Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare, both of which are similarly chaotic in construction. The crisp black and white camerawork is excellent and the sound - so often the fly in the low-budget ointment - never falters.

I can see this one being a hit at festivals and deservedly so.

MJS rating: A-

Director: Declan O’Brien
Writer: Mike MacLean
Producers: Roger Corman, Julie Corman
Cast: Eric Roberts, Sara Malakul Lane, Kerem Bursin
Country: USA
Year of release: 2010
Reviewed from: screener (Anchor Bay)

I really wanted to enjoy Sharktopus more than I did, which was ‘not very much’. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that this is a bad film. Well, let me qualify that slightly. Sharktopus is indeed a bad film but it’s not an insultingly stupid, lazy and inept film. This screener turned up in the same post as Stonehenge Apocalypse and, while I confidently expect that I will never, ever watch either film again, I know which I would plump for if offered this limited choice while strapped into a chair with my eyes held open like Malcolm McDowell.

Although that is partly because, in such a situation, sleep would be difficult but I could reasonably count on Sharktopus to make me nod off, even with eyelid braces in place. I fell asleep twice while trying to sit through this film, and it’s not particularly long. It’s just not gripping at all. I didn’t at any point care what was happening or worry about what might happen next. And call me Mr Fussy-Socks but when I sit down to watch a film about a monster with rows of teeth, lots of tentacles and a list of favourite foods which starts ‘1. People standing next to hot women in bikinis. 2. Hot women in bikinis.’ then I expect to find myself taking an interest in proceedings. Is that too much to ask?

I may be speculating wildly here - actually there’s no ‘may’, this is just pure speculation - but I envisage Sharktopus as Roger Corman’s answer to The Asylum. Corman was the King of the Bs for so long; folk like Charlie Band and Uncle Lloyd established their own distinctive niches but never came close to challenging for the throne. Then those rootin’ tootin’ Asylum boys moseyed into town and swiftly staked out a claim as purveyors of finest grade, hugely enjoyable, cut-price cinematic tat.

After making their name - establishing their brand identity, if you will - with a series of insane (and sometime insanely cheeky) ‘mockbusters’, The Asylum really announced their entry into the original creature feature market with the utterly bonkers, utterly brilliant Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus.

I can just imagine Corman, sat in his office, looking at how many hits the Mega-Shark vs trailer had received on YouTube, and plotting his counter-attack. If people want a film about a shark and an octopus, how about a film about something which is both shark and octopus? An, if you will, sharktopus? Not only would this be something new and original, something unique and distinctive, but it also saves money by requiring only one piss-poor CGI creature instead of two. ‘Ker-ching’ go the dollar-signs in the producer’s eyes.

Or maybe he just had a bad dream. Or maybe he was doodling during a dull conference call and found he had sketched a shark with octopus tentacles. Who knows?

I just wish that, having conceived this absolutely insane, loopily brilliant idea, Corman and co. had done something with it. But no. It’s half-shark, half-octopus and it kills people. That’s pretty much the extent of the plot.

In the opening scene, two young women in bikinis are sunbathing on the beach at Santa Monica. Actually, before we get to them there is a good minute or two of establishing stock footage of attractive young people in beachwear doing beach things like sunbathing, swimming, playing volleyball, eating ice creams etc. This is a recurring motif throughout the film. Excepting the bits of the film which actually take place out at sea on boats, no scene is allowed to start without a chunk of bikini-packed stock beach footage.

Fred Olen Ray once famously observed that “nudity is the cheapest special effect” but actually I think that - assuming this stuff was sitting on a shelf in Corman’s offices and not specially shot by sending an intern down to the beach with a domestic camcorder - the cheapest special effect can now be officially recognised as stock footage of women in bikinis. I don’t know how long Sharktopus would be without all this padding but it might have difficulty making feature-length.

Anyway, one of these women goes swimming and is chased by the world’s least realistic shark fin in a scene which steals everything from the equivalent bit of Jaws except the music, the quality and the technical and artistic skill. Her friend screams quite half-heartedly to look out but no-one else on the beach pays attention because they are all stock footage, and there’s no-one else in the water either (except in all the establishing shots).

Just as the shark (it looks like it’s supposed to be a mako, but that’s more likely coincidence than planned detail) is about to grab the girl, it is itself grabbed by a thing which is basically the front half of a great white and the back half of an abnormally large giant pacific octopus (with some extra spiky-quill things sticking out of its gill slits because obviously just a run-of-the-mill shark/octopus hybrid wouldn’t be scary enough). Oh, and it has a sort of electronic doodad strapped to its back like the sort of frickin’ laser beam that Dr Evil insisted on attaching to his own sharks.

Except that this is not a frickin’ laser beam but some sort of control unit. For this is S11 (constantly pronounced “essleven”) a bioengineered weapon created by a company called Bluewater which consists of mad scientist Nathan Sands (the ever-reliable Eric Roberts: Sanctimony, Raptor, Endangered Species, The Shadow Men and of course the Doctor Who telemovie) and his sexy-nerdette daughter Nicole (Sara Malakul Lane, a British actress/model born and raised in Thailand, who was in a Steven Seagal film). They are, naturally, testing this highly dangerous creation not in a tank at some ocean research institute but in the surf off California’s most popular beach.

Sands is demonstrating S11 to Commander Cox (Calvin Persson) of the US Navy who seems to think that it is generally a good idea to employ tiny family businesses to somehow develop dangerous new breeds of marine life in the never-ending war against drug-runners and terrorists. Tragically, a further attempt to test S11 by nearly crashing it into some random dude’s motorboat causes the frickin’ laser beam box to get knocked off the creature’s back. And from then on it’s up to the Bluewater team to find and capture the creature as it makes its way down the coast to Mexico, where life is cheap and filming permits are cheaper.

Although the current Bluewater employee roster has only two names on it, there was a previous member of the team, Andy Flynn (Turkish-born Kerem Bursin making his feature debut after a few shorts) who helped to develop S11 but then left to put his scientific knowledge to better use by partying South of the Border. We meet him in a swimming pool, wearing a sombrero, playing drinking games with two non-speaking bit-part bimbos. Sands offers Flynn enough money to join the hunt for S11 and also gets along Flynn’s best buddy Santos (Julian Gonzalez, a prolific Spanish actor) who may or may not have previously worked for Bluewater.

Flynn was previously an item with Nicole and still fancies his chances but her heart belongs to Daddy - and to bioengineering. Santos, as a substantial supporting character with lots of dialogue but no significant character flaws, no romantic interest and no full name is instantly marked out as sharktopus-bait, though he does survive for most of the film.

So Nicole, Flynn and Santos set out on a small boat to track down the creature using Nicole’s laptop - somehow - while Sands Sr stays on a much larger boat, knocking back G&Ts provided by his one-man crew/staff and taking occasional video calls from Commander Cox. And now we have a succession of cameos in which we meet someone, they do something or say something - and then they get grabbed and eaten by S11. Repeat to fade. We’re never asked to care about or know these people - they’re just anonymous, one-note plot-fodder. It’s like watching a B-movie version of Casualty.

Actually the first taste of this is back in California where two guys painting the side of the Queen Mary discuss how they would prefer to die before being grabbed by CG tentacles. Then down Mexico way we have a guy on a yacht, a guy on a jet-ski... Sharktopus is an equal-opportunities carnivore and sometimes a woman gets it too. There’s a bikini-clad beachcomber whose metal detecting uncovers a massive gold medallion - moments before she is randomly grabbed and dragged into the sea, screamingly mildly. And there a bungee-jumping scene which seems to be there primarily in order to be included in the trailer.

Now, a word about the screaming. Back in the 1980s there were ladies called ‘scream queens’ - Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens, Michelle Bauer et al - and throughout the 1990s the term persisted, consistently devalued as more and more actresses, further and further down the sub-Hollywood ladder, started brandishing it about. I mention this because Sharktopus really, really needs some scream queens. I’ve never before watched a film where so many women screamed so half-heartedly. Oh dear, my boyfriend is being devoured by a hideous mutant creature right in front of my eyes and in all probability I’m next. Oh goodness, oh hellup, oh my.

One of the more interesting pieces of sharktopus-bait is a pirate radio DJ named Captain Jack (Ralph Garman, who does voices for Family Guy) who broadcasts from his yacht, assisted by a lithe but stand-off-ish babe called Stephie (Shandi Finnessey, who was Miss USA 2004) who, like almost all the women in this film, wears nothing except a string bikini and sunglasses. We meet these two a couple of times as Captain Jack reports disbelievingly on breaking stories of a shark-octopus monster attacking people up and down the Mexican coast.

The closest we actually get to a real supporting character (and the only woman apart from Nicole to not wear the otherwise obligatory four triangles and a few bits of string, is TV reporter Stacy Everheart (Liv Boughn, also in Corman’s Dinoshark!) who is desperate for a report that will not only make her career but save her job and thinks she might have found it. She is accompanied everywhere by her long-suffering cameraman Bones (the unconventionally alliterative Hector Jimenez, who was in environmentalist fantasy Christmas comedy Navidad SA) and finds her information source in a world-weary drunk named Pez (Blake Lindsey, who played a serial killing Johann Sebastian Bach in a very odd 2009 short) who claims to have seen the monster in all its gory glory.

In terms of a story, what we get is Nicole, Flynn and Santos looking for (and occasionally finding) the monster; Stacy, Bones and Pez looking for (and occasionally finding) the monster; and assorted, mostly nameless bit-parts not looking for (but invariably being found by) the monster. All those scenes have been put into a multi-disc DVD player and then someone, possibly Corman himself, has pressed the ‘shuffle’ button and called it a movie.

That’s actually truer than you might think because although there is some narrative progression in both the Nicole/Flynn/Santos storyline and the Stacy/Bones/Pez B-story, the movie has a typically Corman-esque attitude to continuity which is so cavalier that it wears a big floppy hat and lots of lace while fighting a losing battle against Parliamentary forces. There’s a sequence where Nicole, Flynn and Santos are joined by two other unnamed divers so that these two extras (who might as well wear red Star Fleet uniforms for all the hope they have of surviving) can join Flynn in an underwater battle against the beast.

But about ten minutes beforehand, when there is no-one in this (really very small) boat except the three regulars, a long-shot of the vessel skimming across the waves clearly shows five people on board.

The thing is: Roger Corman doesn’t care. Roger Corman already has your money (or at least, the distributor/broadcaster’s money) and he knows that there is an exact level of crappiness to aim for: no higher, no lower. Provided a film meets a minimum requirement (and regular followers of this site will realise that this is a low, low baseline) it can be as crappy as it wants in other ways. All sorts of corners can be cut without losing sales. And every dollar saved is an extra dollar of profit. That’s the Corman way.

Certainly no unnecessary money has been spent on the CGI creature which is desperately awful, not just in the tentacles which rise from the ocean waves, but also when seen in its entirety on land. (Did I mention that S11 can climb out of the sea and crawl around on land in exactly the way that neither sharks not octopuses can? No? Neither did the film-makers. It seems to be just an idea that they had halfway through production when they realised that they might need something with the approximate shape of a third act.)

Ooh, and that reminds me of another point. Everyone in this film uses the term ‘octopi’ in an attempt to sound clever and all scientific and shit. But the plural of octopus is octopodes, as any fule kno. (Yes, some dictionaries also list ‘octopi’ but that is because dictionaries record usage, they don’t dictate it. The suffix of the word is the Greek ‘-pus’ not the Latin ‘-us’ so it doesn’t pluralise like nautili, omnibi or diplodoci.)

There’s not a lot more to say about the plot of Sharktopus and certainly nothing more to be said about its characters, apart from the revelation that Sands Sr had somehow tampered with his daughter’s bioengineering software to make S11 even more deadly than planned and this is why it is attacking innocent Americans in Mexico. And not because, you know, it is an artificially created killing machine with rows of teeth, huge tentacles (which vary in length from scene to scene and have hard stabbing points just like octopus tentacles don’t) and a voracious appetite.

At this stage in the review I would normally list other cast members and what they have been in but hardly anyone in this film has any other credits. The only notable name is Mike Gaglio, a veteran of Fred Olen Ray movies and many other DTV titles who managed, within the space of about 18 months, to appear (uncredited) in this, in Asylum sequel Mega-Shark vs Crocosaurusand in Fred’s own Super Shark. Corman himself makes a cameo as a beach bum who calmly watches the metal-detecting babe get dragged into the sea and devoured.

Let’s instead take a look at director Declan O’Brien who started out as a stage actor in New York but switched to producing and directing when he moved out to Hollywood. He seems to be contentedly carving out a career shooting these Happy Shopper horrors, having written and/or directed Snakeman, Savage Planet, Harpies, Rock Monster, Monster Ark and Corman’s Roman epic Cyclops, also starring Eric Roberts. In 2009 he made Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead and is now helming another entry in that franchise (which should really be called Wrong Turn 4: Why Don’t We Stop and Ask Someone, although it probably won’t be).

The idea for Sharktopus originated with the SyFy Channel (so my theory about Corman reacting to The Asylum is completely wrong, but who cares?). The script was written by Mike MacLean, a High School teacher in Arizona who was approached by Corman based on some of his published crime fiction. Initially asked to work on Jim Wynorski’s Dinocroc vs Supergator script, MacLean also contributed to Road Raiders, the final film by Filipino legend Cirio Santiago which Wynorski completed before it fell into rights hell. MacLean, Wynorski and Corman are, as I type, collaborating on Piranhaconda, a creature which will probably have razor sharp pincers on its fins because a run-of-the-mill piranha/anaconda hybrid just wouldn’t be scary enough.

Tom Hiel composed the score, a gig he probably got because he worked with O’Brien on Rock Monster and Cyclops, rather than because he scored the mid-1990s crime caper Swimming with Sharks (although that may have helped...). He also contributed to Scary Movie 2, Christina Ricci werewolf bomb Cursed and the second and third Rugrats movies. The Sharktopus soundtrack also features a song by a band called the Cheater Whores who are the director’s nieces.

Cinematographer Santiago Navarrete was camera operator on Mexican-shot Hollywood pictures like The Mask of Zorro and Vampires: Los Muertos and also DPed a 1980 Mexican version of Jack the Ripper. Editor Vikram Kale has a portmanteau-named-monster-heavy CV that includes Dinoshark, Dinocroc and Supergator!

The VFX are credited to Dilated Pixels, whose other work includes giant bug movie Infestation and a Lord of the Rings video game. They do their best but the budget is small and the monster is dumb. At its heart, Sharktopus is an idea in search of a plot. Films like this often rip off the plots of bigger, better films so Sharktopus is to be commended for not being a blatant clone of something. On the other hand, a ripped-off plot might have given it more structure, form and interesting content.

As mentioned, Corman has also made Dinoshark and is working on Piranhaconda. Coming soon, no doubt, will be Dinoconda, Piranhopus, Crococonda, Piranhoshark, Octoconda...

Repeat to fade.

MJS rating: C

Director: Dan Rickard
Writers: Dan Rickard, Will Martin
Director: Simon Drake
Cast: Dan Rickard, Samantha Bolter, Chris Wandell
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.darkestday.co.uk

Looked at objectively, on an absolute scale, Darkest Day is a run of the mill zombie feature. Since 2000 there have been more than 80 feature-length zombie films made and released in this country (plus hundreds of others around the globe). Do we really need another?

Yes. Yes, we probably do when it’s this good and this interesting. Darkest Day is a labour of love that reflects every ounce of time and effort – and the few hundred quid – that has gone into it. Brilliantly integrated CGI effects make it look like it cost a hundred times its actual meagre budget.

There isn’t, it must be admitted, a great deal of story. Nor is there a great deal of depth to the characters. Let me qualify that: they’re not sketchily drawn stereotypes. We just don’t get to know them very well. What there is – and this matters to this reviewer at least – is a bleak, depressing atmosphere throughout the film. When I sit down to watch a zombie picture, I expect it to be stark and cheerless. Unless you’re actually making a zom-com, like Shaun of the Dead or Stalled, then an effective zombie picture needs to serve up nihilism, despair and a hopeless vision for the (non)future of the human race. That’s what I enjoy watching.

Oh, and squaddies. You’ve got to have squaddies. It’s a tradition or an old charter or something.

Writer-director Dan Rickard stars as Dan, a young man who wakes up on Brighton beach with no memory of anything, not even the recent zombie apocalypse. He is taken in – with varying degrees of warmth/caution – by a group of twentysomethings who have, for reasons that are never clear, decided to stay in their house when absolutely everyone else has been evacuated to ‘safety camps’.

I can’t say I particularly warmed to this group, who look, behave and live like students. When deadly, fast-moving, ravenous ghouls are roaming the streets, spending your evenings drinking beer and larking about doesn’t strike me as terribly sensible behaviour. I’m not actually quite sure how many people there are in the house, although in the film’s favour the ones with least character/presence are generally the ones that get killed first and the ones we get to spend time with and bother about later in the film are more clearly defined.

As for the zombies in this movie, they are very much post-28 Days Later. They are ‘infected’ rather than reanimated, and they run very fast, with little co-ordination, desperate to munch down on any living thing. And there’s a lot of them - up to 50 or so in some scenes.

As well as avoiding the zombies, Dan and his mates have to avoid being caught by roving squads of soldiers in full camo and gas masks. While the army do seem to be on the look-out for the gang in the house, they’re really looking for Dan of course. With the film being shot and set in Brighton this put me very much in mind of Project Assassin, but since no-one’s ever seen that film and most of this lot were still at nursery when it was made, any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

There’s really not much to the story, as I say, but this is a film where you metaphorically leave the cinema whistling the post-production. An enjoyable and informative half-hour Making Of gives some insight into the film which started life as a short, then a remake of the short, then a feature, shot in fits and starts over about four years. Most of the dialogue is improvised, which is not really a problem as there’s not much narrative to drive; in fact there’s a sense that parts of the story were pretty much made up as the team went along.

Rickard has done an absolutely magnificent job of turning his locations into a deserted, broken down city. To be fair, he was starting with 21st century Brighton so was already closer to a derelict, inhospitable wasteland than he would have been in many nicer towns. Nevertheless, the visual effects here are stunning. Smashed windows, abandoned cars, rubbish and fires. All applied to footage shot on the fly, early in the morning or just in gaps between the traffic. When you think of what Danny Boyle and his crew were able to do with umpteen million quid a decade or so ago, and now what one guy can do literally in his bedroom, it's astounding.

Beyond the mise-en-scene though, there’s the use of computer effects – CGI and matting – to populate the story. Richard only had access to three army uniforms, yet there are scenes with a dozen or more squaddies, composited together from multiple takes of the same three actors (hence the gas masks!). There are military vehicles on the roads, and frequent shots of a Chinook helicopter. I was both amazed and delighted to find that some of these vehicles, including the Chinook, are not fully CGI but Airfix kits, shot against a green screen and then matted in. It’s a real joy to see practical miniature effects used – and used very effectively - in a micro-budget picture like this.

Rickard has some experience in this field as he was special effects supervisor for the Ford Brothers’ magnificent The Dead, one of the very best zombie films ever made in my humble opinion, and also its India-set sequel (which I still haven’t been able to see). He also did effect on a few shorts including Edilberto Restino’s metaphysical WW2 drama Red Letter and Andreas Ksoll’s comedy Boiler, plus cinematography on Dead Air, a sci-fi short by Darkest Day producer Simon Drake (Drake, who also appears on screen, has various low-level crew gigs on his CV including Philip Ridley’s Heartless and a brace of Mark Gatiss TV jobs, The First Men in the Moon and Crooked House.) Composer Richard ‘Wilx’ Wilkinson (who also scored Ross Shepherd’s Heathen) is also in the cast.

As an example of bedroom creativity above and beyond the call of duty, Darkest Day is unprecedented. Immediately after watching the Making Of, I was borderline considering whether I should award this an A+ for being so much better than it had any right to be. But on reflection, I couldn’t do that for a film that was so vague in terms of story and characters. Not emptily, disappointingly vague, but certainly not particularly gripping or compelling. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed Darkest Day very much. But it’s not The Dead, let’s put it that way. It’s not a powerful social statement about imperialism or racism or globalism or even about Brighton. It’s just a good zombie film. And fair play to Rickard – that’s what he set out to make. And I feel really bad for criticising the film in this way. But them’s the breaks.

Completed over several years, Darkest Day had a brief theatrical release in May 2015, playing a few venues in London and Brighton, ahead of a DVD release that same month from Left Films.

MJS rating: A-

Writer: ‘Elisar C Kennedy’
Producer: ‘Elisar C Kennedy’, Daniel Figuero
Cast: Kerry Norton, Eileen Daly, Daniel Jordan
Country: UK
Year of release: 1995
Reviewed from: US DVD (Brentwood)

I suspect most horror fans would agree that the Golden Age of British Horror started in 1957 with the release of Hammer’s Curse of Frankenstein (fortuitously synchronous, across the Atlantic, with AIP’s I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, the release of the Shock Theatre package of old Universal movies to TV, and the launch of Famous Monsters of Filmland). That said, there is an argument for dating the Golden Age back a couple of years to The Quatermass Xperiment. If Curse marked the first page in the story – not just of Hammer but of classic British horror – then the first couple of Quatermasses (and, I guess, X the Unknown) are clearly a prologue of some sort.

By a similar token…

In Urban Terrors: New British Horror Cinema 1997-2008 I made it quite clear that, in my view, the British Horror Revival started in 1997 with Darklands, followed swiftly by Urban Ghost Story and I, Zombie. But there is an argument for dating this – shall we say? – Silver Age, back a couple of years. And the equivalent of The Quatermass Xperiment here would be Elisar Cabrera’s 1995 picture Demonsoul. Which, after only twenty years, I have finally got round to watching. Look, I’ve been busy, okay?

Demonsoul was not the only British horror film made in the mid-1990s, though there were certainly very few. And it doesn’t have the gritty social realism which would come to characterise the BHR (or at least, the early days thereof). What it does have is a solidly British aesthetic (despite its US funding, which we’ll come to) and a serious approach which marks it out from the more obviously commercial larks of near-contemporaries like Revenge of Billy the Kid or Funny Man. Largely unheralded at the time, Demonsoul showed that a serious horror film could be shot in the UK, on a tiny budget, with professional actors. It just took people a while to notice this.

Probably most importantly, this was shot on video for a straight-to-video release at a time when the prevalent attitude among both film-makers and fans was that all films were still expected to play cinemas, even if it was only one or two. If you've read Urban Terrors (come on, somebody must have...) you'll know that much of the text concerns changes in distribution models, and how those changes allowed the BHR to happen. Back in the 1990s ‘shot on video’ was synonymous with amateur, backyard shenanigans, certainly in this country. But Elisar’s adroit awareness of the US market - largely unknown to most Britons because the web was still so new, small and basic - was as prescient as it was innovative. In its own small way, Demonsoul was actually quite groundbreaking.

All the above notwithstanding, the film’s biggest significance in retrospect, certainly for most horror fans, is as the feature debut of Dame Eileen Daly, soon to establish herself as the Queen of Low Budget British Horror (and, as I type this, ensconced in the Big Brother House).

I also must be honest and say that, although few would argue that Demonsoul is a classic, it is nevertheless a well-made little picture and I have seen many, many subsequent films which were far, far worse. This is more than just a historical curio. I actually quite enjoyed watching it.

Kerry Norton stars as Erica Steele, a young woman with a cute ‘80s-style short-back-and-sides, who has been having recurring nightmares about a mysterious, long-haired woman named Selena (our Eileen). Norton is actually a real, respected actress now (which is not to imply anything against Eileen, whom we love). A former gymnast, she was also in Elisar-produced anthology Virtual Terror and oil rig horror The Devil’s Tattoo/Ghost Rig, which is presumably where she met hubby Jamie Bamber. He went on to play Apollo in the Battlestar Galactica remake, in which Norton also had a recurring role as a medic. More impressively for this reviewer, she was also in The Weird Al Show. Anyone who has been touched by the hand of Al is a legend in my book.

So anyway: seeking answers, Erica visits hypnotherapist Dr Bucher (sic – not ‘Butcher’ or 'Booker' as widely mislisted around the web) played by Daniel Jordan (later in Bane), who has thick lips and hair like a hat but, despite what the IMDB thinks, was definitely not born in Cuba in 1923! Bucher is actually a creep who likes to fondle his hypnotised patients, but he gets a surprise when Erica’s ‘past life’ turns out to be a vampire named Dana. Bucher tries to bargain with Dana – who sprouts fangs when she’s in control of Erica’s body – hoping to gain some of her supernatural power. I don't want to write spoilers but come on, that’s not likely to end up as a good thing, is it?

Meanwhile, Erica’s boyfriend Alex (Drew Rhys-Williams, also credited as fight co-ordinator, who went on to assorted theatre work but did crop up on screen again briefly in 28 Weeks Later) and her friend/colleague Rosemary (South Africa-born stage actress Janine Ulfane whose occasional mentions in Tatler etc indicate she has palatial homes on both sides of the Atlantic) are racing to try and save her - but some undead monks are trying to stop them.

It all culminates in an old church, on the steps of which Erica first met Selena when the former was a little girl (shown in sepia flashbacks). Inside this vast old building, Selena – who calls Dana ‘Mistress’ – and her acolytes plan to force Erica to drink blood from a sacrificial victim (Johnny Vercoutre, also credited as production manager and ‘additional make-up’) with a pentagon carved into his chest. A quartet of vampire babes in torn underwear show up to also feast on this lucky fella, and to feature in the marketing materials despite having neither character names nor any other plot function. A ‘twist’ epilogue features Dark Side editor Allan Bryce (credited as 'Allen') as a doctor and Canadian RJ Bell (Octopussy, Superman III, Morons from Outer Space, Haunted Honeymoon) as Erica’s father. (Johnny Vercoutre incidentally is a grand British eccentric who subsequently established a 1940s retro café in Shoreditch which was used as a location by numerous film and TV shows.)

None of this is played for laughs, despite the inherent cheesiness of such a storyline, and I think that is very much to the film’s credit. Elisar took the work seriously, and so did his cast and crew. That in itself was a departure for UK horror of the era. Also innovative is the fetish/sexual angle, exemplified in the scene of the four hot chicks in ripped black stockings orgasmically licking blood off a guy wearing only a leather posing pouch. And then there’s the sheer Britishness of it. With the exception of RJ Bell, most of the cast are British, using their own accents. The opening titles play over footage of UK iconography: double decker buses and red telephone boxes, Buckingham Palace and Tower Bridge. American horror fans who bought this when it was released were under no illusions that what they were looking at was an import. And this was at a time when the few genre productions happening in the UK – for companies like Metrodome or Peakviewing Transatlantic – were desperate to try and pretend that they were American.

For all of these reasons and more, Demonsoul marked a watershed in the history of British horror: a complete break with the past. There is absolutely no discernible link from this back to Hammer or Amicus or Tigon or Pete Walker or Norman J Warren or anybody or anything. This was something completely new, something literally ahead of its time.

So no, it may not be the best British vampire film ever made, but it’s far from the worst and it is actually watchable: quite exciting in places, well-paced, with a cracking performance from Eileen and generally solid support. Yes, it has the flat image that was an unavoidable side-effect of shooting on 1990s-era video (specifically Hi-8) but Elisar, who was just 23 at the time, directed with skill and a professional eye. DoP Alvin Leong (who also shot parts of Breathe Safely; apparently now a professional photographer in Malaysia with his own photo academy) lit the interiors and exteriors well; there are no sodium-green skin shades here. The only real technical problem is the sound which is quite muffled in places, obscuring some of the dialogue. This is a shame as Elisar's script is well-written, reserving its most portentous, cod-religious lines for Eileen, one of the few actresses who can carry off that sort of thing,

Eileen had been acting for quite a few years when she made Demonsoul, though it was her first feature film. She had done a number of, ahem, adult videos - in fact, her first such works were distributed as 8mm 'loops' - but had also done a considerable amount of theatre as well as corporates and music videos (most famously Soft Cell's 'Tainted Love' for her boyfriend Tim Pope). In the early 1990s she was an item with Nigel Wingrove when he founded Redemption Video. Eileen posed for the company logo and also many of the early VHS sleeves, which eschewed garish original artwork in favour of a distinctive, black and white goth/fetish design. Eileen met Elisar on the set of a student film that both were helping out on, and a couple of years later he approached her to play Selena in his debut feature. (It's worth noting that Eileen wasn't proud of the film at the time and probably hasn't changed her view of it over the years. Personally I think she's underselling herself there: she's actually very good in this.)

As partly noted already, 'Elisar C Kennedy' assembled a remarkable cast around Eileen and Kerry Norton. For example Suzanne Ballantyne, senior programmer at the Raindance Film Festival, plays Erica’s psychiatrist (Raindance founder Elliot Grove can be spotted in the ‘special thanks’ list). The undead monks were Gavin Barnard (now director of something called Digital Entertainment Media), Ric Scadorwa and Mark Braby, who also plays a would-be rapist and now promotes experimental new music through a venue/organisation called The Orchestra Pit.

The closest that the film gets to light relief is Sue Scadding as Bucher’s secretary Marilyn, convinced that in her past life she was a certain famous actress. Former Playboy Bunny Scadding was also in Elisar’s second feature, Witchcraft X: Mistress of the Craft, then disappeared for a decade or so before reappearing in the noughties with roles in Jonathan Glendening’s 13hrs, Alex de la Iglesia’s Oxford Murders and a number of commercials.

Erich Redman, recently seen as a German general in Dominic Burns’ Allies and also in numerous other WW2 pictures (including Captain America: The First Avenger) is a colleague of Bucher’s. Russell Calbert (‘vision and sound engineer’ in the titles, ‘stills photographer’ and ‘ADR recording’ in the credits) is a customer in a comic shop which is, I think, Fantastic Store on Portobello Road. Erica goes into the shop because Alex works upstairs from it. One scene show an archway into a backroom sculpted like a giant set of vampire fangs, a spot of opportunistic mise-en-scene surprisingly underused by Elisar (or maybe he thought it was too obvious…).

The four vampire babes are Katherine Blick, Nikita Blum, Kira Hansen and Hepzibah Sessa. The first two ladies have left no trace but Sessa will be a recognisable name to some as she played keyboards and violin for classical/goth band Miranda Sex Garden. She married Alan Wilder of Depeche Mode and then collaborated with him on his Recoil project. I suspect Kira Hansen may be Danish film director Kira Richards Hansen as she was living in London in the 1990s taking part in ‘performance work’.

And it doesn’t stop there. The little girl playing young Erica in the flashbacks is Pixie Roscoe, now all grown up as author PJ Roscoe. And her two friends? Isabella ‘Izzy’ Hyams went on to be a production assistant on blockbusters including The Dark Knight, Interstellar and Prince of Persia following a spell as casting assistant on The Omen, Hannibal Rising and other big studio productions. Her brother Luke Hyams meanwhile wrote, produced and directed various web series before making his own British horror film with X Moor (on which his sister shot second unit). And he’s not the only future horror director in the cast; Erica and Rosemary’s boss is none other than Graham Fletcher-Cook, 20 years before he made Blood and Carpet.

Crikey!

Behind the camera we find Caroline Barnes handling hair and make-up; nowadays she makes up folk like Kylie, Cheryl Cole and David Beckham for photoshoots in magazines like Vogue, Elle and Marie Claire. ‘Special make-up FX’ are credited to Matt Rowe who now makes weapon props for Marvel blockbusters.

Someone named ‘D Kenrick’ is listed as editor, sound editor and ‘titles and optical effects’, a rather pointless semi-pseudonym as the ‘special thanks’ list clearly identifies him as Diggory Kenrick, who is probably the world’s only reggae flautist (seriously!). The actual score for Demonsoul is credited, according to the IMDB, to ‘Thomas Hamilton (as Thomas Frenzi)’ but in fact the on-screen credit is ‘Thomas Docherty’, though I think it’s the same guy. There’s also a couple of songs by a band called The Earth Babies. Alongside Kenrick, the other editor was Stuart Lansdowne, who now runs a web design company.

A cast and crew like that really underlines what a historically fascinating document this film is. But at the time its significance for Elisar was simply that he got to make a feature film (albeit under a partial pseudonym). He had spent a few years in LA, working his way up from being a runner to helping with production. Jerry Feifer of Vista Street Entertainment therefore knew Elisar and agreed to let him shoot a production for Vista Street in England, on a grand budget of $1,500! (Back in the 1970s Feifer had been Head of Television Research at 20th Century Fox; his sons were mates with a local kid named JJ Abrams!) Vista Street specialised in dirt-cheap ‘erotic horror’ films: a bit of action, a bit of blood and plenty of boobs. But hey, they at least got things made, and Elisar was savvy enough to spot an opportunity. Feifer shares story credit with Elisar and is one of two credited executive producers, the other being Matt Devlen (producer of such classics as The Invisible Maniac and Ozone! Attack of the Redneck Mutants). Elisar’s interview with Devlen from his short-lived trash cinema fanzine Bubblegum can be found online if you look.

After directing Witchcraft X and producing Virtual Terror, Elisar went on to a succession of jobs across all aspects of the film business, but away from any actual cameras: development and sales and that sort of thing, the stuff that doesn’t show up on the IMDB. Nowadays he’s a big name in web serials, and he’s involved with Raindance and MCM London Comic Con and suchlike. Last year he produced the documentary feature Who’s Changing and he’s currently producing Ibiza Undead through Capital City Film, the company he runs with his wife Lisa Gifford. He’s also developing a feature called Suckers, which has Owen Tooth (Devil’s Tower) attached to direct from a screenplay by James Moran (Cockneys vs Zombies, Severance).

The final credit to note is Elisar’s fellow producer Daniel Figuero, a reclusive but relevant name. Figuero produced Demonsoul the same year that he produced Edgar Wright’s first film, micro-budget British western A Fistful of Fingers. He then produced The Scarlet Tunic, arguably the world’s first crowd-funded movie. Though he hasn’t troubled the IMDB for over a decade, Figuero is still out there somewhere making deals.

The version of Demonsoul that I watched was part of a ten-film, five-disc box set released in July 2004 by Brentwood Entertainment called Scared Stiff, also featuring Evil Sister, Hellspawn, Stigma, Colinsville, Nightcrawler, The Screaming, Blood Revenge, Bloodbath and Malibu Beach Vampires. The film was also released in April 2008 in a box called Demons and Witches, alongside Witchcraft X, XI and XII, The Strangers and Crystal Force II, plus Bloodbath, Hellspawn, The Screaming and Evil Sister again. Before either of those there was a four-film pack entitled Too Hot for Hell in October 2003 which combined this film with Crystal Force II, Evil Sister and Bloodbath. Of course, when this first came out in February 1996 it was on VHS... (Demonsoul was also shown twice on the big(ish) screen: a cast and crew screening and - I'm fairly sure - a screening at the 1995 Festival of Fantastic Films in Manchester. That's two more screenings than most Vista Street titles ever managed.)

I very much doubt that Elisar gets a cent from the sale of Demonsoul in any format but I’ve known him for 20 years and he can rest assured that, next time our paths cross, I shall buy him a drink as payment for a fascinating 80 minutes of viewing and an even more fascinating evening of research.

Demonsoul is a genuinely important film, yet almost nothing has been written about it. Harvey Fenton reviewed it at the time in Flesh and Blood (he hated it, mainly because it was shot on video, but was happy to put a photo of the vampire babes on the back cover). Michael J Weldon gave it a short, largely descriptive review in Psychotronic Video. Brycey's involvement suggests there was probably coverage in The Dark Side but evidently I don't have that issue as it's not in my index. Jonathan Rigby completely ignored it when he wrote English Gothic (presumably because he didn’t count DTV releases as real films). Online there’s a review on Taliesin Meets the Vampires, a couple of reviews on other sites which take some digging in Google to find plus a handful of user comments on Amazon and IMDB. (Oh, and it has a page on the Internet Movie Car Database with framegrabs of some of the 1980s/1990s vehicles on display. Wow, and I thought I didn't get out much...) I’m afraid that even in Urban Terrors Elisar's film only gets a passing mention: in the section on Razor Blade Smile, as an early Eileen Daly credit. I reckon the 3,300 words or so in this review is more than all the other coverage the film has had over the past two decades put together. Should I ever find myself writing a second edition of Urban Terrors, rest assured that I shall give Demonsoul more prominence and explain its historical importance.

I can't blame anyone for not noticing Demonsoul at the time. Jeez, it's taken me two decades. But I think it is significant: a break with the old and a pointer towards the new. It certainly didn't precipitate a seismic shift in British horror cinema the way that Darklands or The Curse of Frankenstein did. But then neither did The Quatermass Xperiment four decades before. In both cases, film historians can look back before the zero point - 1957 and 1997 - and find a precedent, unheralded at the time for its significance. That's the fun of cinematic research.
Which just leaves the question of a rating. For what it was, and what it did, and when it was made, and what it led to, and most especially for what it successfully cast aside - the cloying traditionalism and small-minded parochialism of British horror cinema (while at the same time, ironically, asserting a distinctive, proudly British identity) – then I’ve got to be reasonably generous. So:

MJS rating: B+

Director: Christopher Del Gaudio
Writer: Christopher Del Gaudio
Producers: Christopher Del Gaudio, Vernon Gravdal, Loretta Mirabella
Cast: Darren O’Hare, Jason Murphy, Jacqueline Muro
Country: USA
Year of release: 2002
Reviewed from: screener disc

I don’t half get sent some odd stuff to review on this site. I mean, I love it, but boy, sometimes I really have to work hard to work out what to say. Not with the bad stuff. Really bad movies are easy - and fun - to review. And really good stuff gives me plenty to get my teeth into. But then there’s the stuff that’s not like anything else.

Moratorium is a half-hour episode of an anthology series called The Realm of Never which airs on public access TV in the States. Now, we don’t have public access TV in this country and, truth be told, I don’t really understand the concept, my only real knowledge of it coming from repeated viewings of Wayne’s World.

Most public access TV is, I gather, of the Wayne and Garth variety which is why The Realm of Never is so unusual. Not only is it drama, but it is shot live, using three cameras, in a deliberately retro style (and black and white). This, combined with the ‘set’ being not much more than a curtain and a couple of bits of furniture, gives the series (it seems, based on this one episode) a threadbare, archaic appearance which is, I have to assume, completely intentional.

Moratorium is basically a four-hander. Myles Goddard (Darren O’Hare) is a political intern who has been exposed to some sort of virus that grants him omniscience and thereby allows him to understand what is really going on in world politics. Medical expert Dr Beverly Mathias (Jacqueline Muro) and military advisor (or something) Wyndham (Jason Murphy) are interrogating him to find out what he really knows, much to the consternation of his aunt Amanda (Joannne Antonucci, wearing heavier make-up than I have ever seen on any human being). In the second half of the half-hour there is a military guard standing to the side who says a couple of lines (in Russian, I think) but otherwise seems to have no bearing on the matter.

Myles’ viral-induced omniscience reveals to him that our world is being run by shape-shifting aliens. I think. I mean, he never actually comes out and says this but it seems to be what he is alluding to for the best part of thirty minutes. Whether this state of affairs is a good or bad thing, whether Myles’ knowing about it is good or bad, whether other people know or not - sorry, I couldn’t pick up on any of this. There’s lots and lots of dialogue but it’s all very obtuse. There’s also a fair share of pauses and a disconcerting number of times when characters paraphrase what someone else has just said, prefaced with, “So you’re saying...”

I realise that the budget is about twenty bucks, the studio is the size of a telephone kiosk and the whole thing is done live, but my biggest frustration was that no-one does anything. This is the most static, non-visual thing I have ever seen on a TV screen. It’s basically a radio programme; although the Realm of Never website understandably claims comparison with The Twilight Zone and Playhouse 90, it felt more like Dimension X or X Minus One.

But maybe that’s the intention, maybe that’s writer/director/producer Christopher Del Gaudio using his limitations. I find it very, very difficult to review Moratorium out of context as a stand-alone short film because I just don’t know what allowances to make for it. The cast are pretty stiff - but is that deliberate homage to the wooden acting that was more common on TV in the 1950s? There is also a colour epilogue, a Dennis Potter-style twist on what has gone before which raises still further the question of how one should view the preceding twenty-odd minutes.

I think the only coherent criticism I can make of The Realm of Never is this. It seems from the website that Del Gaudio writes and directs all the episodes, but the best anthologies work because of the range of writers and directors they use. Obviously The Realm of Never is not going to attract writers of the calibre of Richard Matheson or Harlan Ellison, but the script is almost always the weakest part of any low-budget production. The plot of Moratorium, inasmuch as it is discernible through the obfuscatory dialogue, seems to be a standard paranoid conspiracy theory which can’t help but make one think of David Icke and similar loonies. There didn’t seem to be any questioning of whether Myles’ ideas were merely drug-induced fantasies. The central idea was discussed to death but not really explored and it came across as a load of new age, crystal-gazing hippy hooha, which I don’t think was the intention.

I always review films on the basis of how well they achieve what they set out to do with what they have available, but I don’t have enough cultural experience of 1950s American live television to evaluate the former and I don’t have enough grasp of public access TV to judge the latter. I’ll give the show the benefit of the doubt, because Del Gaudio seems to know what he’s doing, but I can’t say this was really my cup of tea. Still, full credit to the guy (and his crew and rep company of actors) for doing something different and evidently doing it successfully.

MJS rating: B

Director: Nathan Smith
Writers: Nathan Smith, Bryan Allen
Producer: Clifford A Miles
Cast: Ken Sansom, R Chase O’Neil, C Brock Holman
Country: USA
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Porchlight)

Who doesn’t love a good monsterfest, a film that gathers together a whole bunch of classic monsters in one story? This specific subgenre can trace its origins back to the final three films in Universal’s Frankenstein series in the 1940s. House of Frankenstein went one better on the previous Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man by tossing Dracula into the mix. This formula was repeated in House of Dracula then spoofed in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein which also threw a Vincent Price-voiced Invisible Man in as a final gag.

The other two well-known monsterfests are The Munsters (in all its many variants) and Fred Dekker’s wonderful The Monster Squad. Van Helsing falls into the category too as does a 1990s TV mini-series which appropriated the House of Frankenstein title. And then there are the animated monsterfests. Series such as The Drak Pack, The Groovy Ghoulies and Gravedale High took advantage of the freedom which animation offered, where a monster character costs no more than a human one. But probably the two best animated monsterfests are the brace that were produced by the famous Rankin-Bass Studio: the stop-motion Mad Monster Party? (with its completely inexplicable titular question mark) and the lesser-known, cel-animated Mad Mad Mad Monsters.

Well, now here’s another one. Produced in 2007 and released onto DVD in time for Halloween 2008, this is a half-hour stop-motion film so packed with classic monsters that it’s difficult to find a subgenre that it doesn’t tread on. It’s not a great film in terms of script or characters but TF seems to like it and he’s the target audience much more than an old monster-geek like me.

Spooky Bats and Scaredy Cats concerns two children out trick-or-treating. Makean looks to be about seven or eight and is wearing a quite good vampire costume, which just about shoves this into the vampire subgenre because, oddly, that’s the one type of classic monster which is not included. Makean’s name is pronounced ‘Mac -KEE -an’. His sister Katie is about twelve and is dressed as a cat, complete with ears, tail, furry cuffs and ankles and a wide, 1960s-style belt that puts one unavoidably in mind of the very different (or maybe not so different) cat-suits worn by Emma Peel.

After Makean is scared by a mouse and a scarecrow in a cornfield (the mouse is wearing a puritan outfit for some reason), he and his sister walk into the village where they meet an elderly fellow called the Candleman. He has a wide-brimmed hat covered with lit candles and also a pet fish called Brunswick which floats in the air and is towing a small cart along the ground.

Here’s what you need to understand this film. Spooky Bats and Scaredy Cats is the second in a projected series of seven such tales under the banner Evergreen Holiday Classics. The first film in the series was called The Light Before Christmas and there is a trailer for both that one and this on the Spooky Bats DVD. This is why we are neither introduced to Katie and Makean (which is no real narrative problem as they’re generic kids) nor to the Candleman himself. This latter situation is a problem because the Candleman is entirely an invented character with no basis in legend or fiction so we have no references. Katie and Makean evidently know him but how, and who the jiminy is he? And, er, why does he have a pet fish that can fly? Presumably there is some background in The Light Before Christmas but the film-makers have forgotten that people who buy this disc won’t necessarily have seen the previous one (which is still available in the UK but seems to have been deleted in the States).

Also important to know is that the characters and settings are based on the work of James C Christensen, a Hugo- and Chesley-winning artist whose speciality is heavily-clothed figures in whimsical settings, often with a spiritual or religious element. And whose trademark is a fish, swimming through the air. I didn’t know any of this when I watched the DVD.

The Candleman asks the two children if they will deliver some invitations to his Halloween party, to which they agree, hoping to collect some candy along the way. And this is where all the monsters come in...

Among the recipients of invitations are a mummy (inside an Egyptian tomb), a werewolf, a plant-creature who is to all intents and purposes Swamp Thing, a zombie (we only see the cadaverous arm reaching from the grave), a family of ghosts, some giant carnivorous plants, the Grim Reaper, an old witch and finally ‘Frank’ - and we can all guess who that turns out to be. Along the way, the sceptical Katie who doesn’t believe in ‘spooks’ (the M-word is never used) comes round to her more paranoid brother’s way of thinking. The quest ends at the home of the ‘fire-headed pumpkin demon’ (or somesuch) with a selection of the ghouls advancing towards the two terrified children.

But... it turns out that this is actually the Candleman’s home and the ghouls are of course his friends, come for the party. So is the message that we should conquer our fears or that there is nothing to be afraid of? Is the message that spooks and monsters are real but friendly or that they’re not real? This isn’t the first animated special I’ve come across where, despite a general moral tone, the actual moral itself is rather fuzzy.

There are some very nice touches. In handing the invitation to the mummy, Katie accidentally rips his arm off and he picks this up to wave bye-bye (or rather “Bmm-bmm” - there’s a lovely gag at the end where Frankenstein complains to the werewolf that he can’t understand a word that the mummy says). Also, the scene with the ghosts has Katie repeatedly trying to hand over the invitation only for it to fall through the recipient's non-corporeal hand.

Where the film falls down is in its own uncertainty about whether it’s set in the real world or some magical fairyland. Katie and Makean’s costumes suggest that they are contemporary characters, especially as they collect their treats in plastic, pumpkin-shaped baskets. Their speech is contemporary too, as is the older sibling’s dismissive attitude towards her brother’s childish belief in the supernatural which is finally dispelled when the witch lends them two flying broomsticks to carry them to ‘Frank’s place’.

But the village that we see is straight out of the Brothers Grimm via Hollywood, a mittel-European-influenced, 18th century hamlet. There is even a brief glimpse of the lower half of a giant, also out trick-or-treating. When the Candleman (who is very obviously a magical character, even before we notice his fish) sends the kids off on their errand, he summons an old-fashioned carriage without horses or driver, of which Katie blithely comments, “This must be one of those new steam-powered carriages.”

You see the problem? The film’s core is the acceptance by modern, cynical Katie that magic and the supernatural are real, yet she and her brother evidently already live in a quasi-historical world riven with magic and fantasy. This robs the film of its essential dichotomy. Not that five-year-olds like TF are going to mind.

The animation is very good although there is something about the alternate heads of the Candleman figure which means that his mouth movements don’t exactly match his words. I don’t know if this is a problem with the bar-sheeting (see, I know my technical animation terms!) or whether some of the dialogue was changed after the animation had been done. Nevertheless, the designs, the sets, the costumes are all impressive and where digital effects are used they are effectively integrated into the story, such as creating the mist-covered swamp.

Another five Evergreen Holiday Classics are planned: A Cozy Valentine, Shamrocks Leprechauns and Shillelaghs (for St Patrick’s Day), Independence - What a Day! and films based around Easter and Thanksgiving. These are all summarised on the series’ website although it’s notable that the synopsis of the Halloween film is different to what we see here. In November 2008, just after Spooky Bats was released on DVD, The Light Before Christmas opened theatrically in some IMAX theatres.

The company behind the Evergreen Holiday Classics is Tandem Motion Picture Studios, a Utah-based animation studio run by brothers Chris and Nathan Smith. Nathan Smith directed Spooky Bats and wrote it in collaboration with Bryan Allen although curiously Chris Smith doesn’t seem to be credited anywhere. Allen, Smith, producer Clifford A Miles, executive producer Michael R Todd and James C Christensen share the ‘story’ credit and Christensen also gets ‘based upon characters created by’ which seems fair enough. I’m guessing that Todd uses his middle initial to differentiate himself from the Barnsley-born animator who was technical director on Ratatouille, The Incredibles and Wall-E, although I suppose that they could be the same bloke as his bio says he has also working on Disney’s aborted Snow Queen feature (as well as Shark Tale, Reign of Fire and Spider-Man).

Cliff Miles, who also handled voice direction, has worked on a wide range of other projects include the world’s largest dinosaur museum (very rich in fossils, Utah). And in that vein it looks like Tandem’s next film isn’t another Candleman short but a feature called Pangea which will be the first film ever to mix dinosaurs with elves! It’s all about a ‘water elf’ called Nemonie who teams up with a dinosaur called Gobi to search for treasure on the prehistoric supercontinent (Nemonie is also the title used on a trailer on the Tandem Studios website).

Argentinean production designer Nebel Luccion was responsible for translating Christensen’s distinctive style into 3D with the assistance of wardrobe designer Patricia Walton. Visual effects supervisor Mathew Judd has worked on the likes of Lake Placid, Deep Blue Sea, The World is Not Enough, Minority Report and Mission: Impossible II as well as a large number of games and some military training simulation programmes.

Leading the voice cast is Ken Sansom as the Candleman. He has been the voice of Rabbit in Winnie the Pooh films and TV series since the late 1980s; his other credits include Herbie Rides Again, 1983 TV pilot The Invisible Woman and the voice of Hound in the Transformers TV series. R Chase O’Neil (Katie) was born in March 1993 (not October as the IMDB has it) and started her career in 2000 with a small part in a TV movie based on the JonBenet Ramsey case, progressing to war drama Saints and Soldiers and ice skating film Go Figure. C Brock Holman (Makean) was in a 2003 production called A Pioneer Miracle which was directed by cinematographer TC Christensen (I don’t know if he’s related to James C).

The werewolf, the witch and Frankenstein are voiced respectively by Joel Bishop (who was also in Saints and Soldiers and that JonBenet telemovie as well as Stalking Santa and Cyber Sleuths), Mary Parker Williams (Don’t Look Under the Bed, Firestarter 2) and Christopher Miller (who could be one of several actors of that name).

The other element of note is the music by Lisle Moore, who has previously scored trailers such as The Missing, Haunted Mansion and Cold Mountain as well as various Playstation games. Specifically, there is a song midway through the film as Katie and Makean fly on the broomsticks which is an utterly shameless rip-off of The Nightmare Before Christmas (complete with “Halloween! Halloween!” chorus). The aping of Danny Elfman’s music is so blatant that it frankly spoils and cheapens the production as a whole, which is a shame.

One final point to note is the running time which according to the DVD sleeve is 65 minutes. In fact, Spooky Bats and Scaredy Cats runs only half an hour, the rest being padded out with the two trailers, a short (but surprisingly good) look behind the scenes of the production... and half a dozen public domain Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons. That’s a bit naughty, although we should blame the distributor, not the producers.

While it has its faults, mainly in the story department, Spooky Bats and Scaredy Cats is a nicely produced little special which has enough fun for its target audience and enough monsters gathered in one place to get adult fans excited.

MJS rating: B+

Director: John Wheeler
Writer: John Wheeler
Producer: Laurence Williams
Cast: Aaron Long, Sarah Jane, Simon Sokolowski-Betts
Country: UK
Year of release: 2014
Website: www.lakeedgeproductions.co.uk
Reviewed from: online screener

The Last Road is a stunning-looking film which struggles manfully to overcome fundamental problems of character and narrative. The end result is not displeasing, but the experience of watching this ambitious movie is a somewhat hollow one. The film washed over me but left no mark. It provoked no thoughts, it provided no insight, it generated no feelings. Which is a shame.

Aaron Long stars as Toby Thwaite, an angry young man whose life consist of (a) abusing his bed-ridden mother (executive producer Dorothy Wheeler), (b) long walks across the Wiltshire countryside with his scruffy dog Prince, and (c) bare-knuckle fights in the back of a local pub. After one such fight goes a wee bit too far, Toby dies and finds himself in an afterlife which mirrors the real world except for being drained of much of its colour and only sparsely populated.

Returning to his mother’s house, Toby finds he can’t see her – but can see and interact with the previous (deceased) resident who throws him out on his ear. This was my favourite scene in the whole film. Irina Fisher’s cameo is an awesome, invective-filled, abusive monologue, complete with low-level violence, as years of pent-up frustration at having to share space in ‘her’ house is finally given vent.

After this however, Toby sets off to wander disconsolately around the empty countryside and frankly does little else for the rest of the (very long) movie. He meets an afterlife administrator, Edith, who drives a Mini and has a report on Toby’s life which determines what happens to him next. What happens is: he gets out of the Mini and does some more disconsolate wandering.

Over the course of his wandering he encounters various lost souls but they provide no revelation or insight – to him or to us – and on each occasion, after a while, Toby sets off again on his aimless quest. He meets Prince, whose presence in the afterlife is due to having been killed by a local small-time gangster as punishment for Toby failing to throw a fight. Prince joins the wander, his upbeat canine cheer counterpointing, to some extent, Toby’s disconsolatenessitude.

Eventually Toby achieves a degree of stability in a ‘camp’ made from junk with a man named Richardson (Simon Sokolowski-Betts) and two women whose names aren’t made clear (Laura Marklew and Becki Silcox). When Richardson disposes of one of the women and then steals Edith’s Mini, Toby and the other woman set off in pursuit, assisted by a large gang of bikers (who presumably all died in a giant motorway pile-up). Toby is briefly distracted by a group of lost souls chanting in front of a Christian cross but the unnamed woman pulls him away.

The above sort-of-synopsis will, I think, demonstrate that this is a picaresque tale of an incidental journey. The problem is that none of the incidents on that journey are very interesting. The various characters are so wafer-thin that most of them don’t even have names. Much of the film is dialogue-free, and what little dialogue does exist is uninspiring.

To its credit, the film avoids pretentious cod-Biblical pronouncements. Explanation about what’s going on is largely delivered by Edith, a cracking performance from Sarah-Jane Williams (credited as just ‘Sarah Jane’, also responsible for make-up, hair and costumes) who delivers her lines with a no-nonsense approach and a slightly world-weary tone. This really gives Edith a depth of character that many of the other lost souls lack. There are also some flashbacks to Toby’s childhood (Mackenzie Arnold Williams plays him as a child), mostly involving a small music box. Producer Laurence Williams plays his angry father in one scene.

The big problem with The Last Road– apart from the fact that it doesn’t really go anywhere or do anything – is that Toby Thwaite himself is not in any way a sympathetic character. He’s a deeply unpleasant, violent idiot who bullies his own mother and apparently earns his living by kicking the shit out of people who are in turn kicking the shit out of him, for the amusement of other deeply unpleasant, violent idiots and the profit of small-time gangsters. The fact that he loves his dog, and sometimes prays in an empty church, isn’t enough for us to feel any empathy with him in the first half hour while he’s still alive. Nor is it sufficient for us to care what happens to him after he dies. He’s already dead, so even if we liked him there’s no way we can root for him to survive to the end of the film, which is really the baseline of empathy required of any movie character.

The end of the film, incidentally, is a long way off. The Last Road runs a massive 113 minutes which is at least half an hour too long. Big Hollywood blockbusters run two hours because they’re full of things exploding and/or complex character dynamics. An indie film about a man wandering through the afterlife with his dog shouldn’t run more than 80 minutes or so. There’s no particular scene or sequence that needs removing – the narrative is so shallow that no one bit stands out – it’s the film as a whole that needs multiple small trims to get that run-time down. The nub of the problem is this: not much happens, there are long gaps of nothing between the things that do happen, and when they eventually happen they’re very slow and drawn-out. This is a laconic, almost lethargic film. Which is quite an achievement in itself: very few films that feature two violent bare-knuckle bouts, a mass biker rally, a fatal stabbing and a woman dancing in nothing but body paint could be described as ‘lethargic’.

On the plus side – and there is a plus side – this is a beautifully photographed movie. Visually, it’s terrific. Wheeler’s camera-work is very impressive. As director he has a penchant for constant cutting, with most shots lasting no more than a second or two: long shot, close-up, medium shot, two-shot, cut, cut, cut. It’s a distinctive style, despite which – or possibly because of which – the rare shots held at length really stand out. These are mostly long shots of Toby which really show off the local countryside. The draining of colour from the afterlife is subtle but effective, and the interior scenes in the first act are also well-lit and well-framed. On top of which, the sound is excellent, both the recording and the mix. Mark Standing provided the effective music.

John Wheeler is represented numerous times throughout the credits, though he’s not quite a one-man band. Lead actor Long is credited as ‘stunt co’ordinator (sic)/fight choreographer’ and there are numerous uses of the term ‘feral’/’ferel’ in the credits which I have no idea what they are referring to (or mean).

On a technical and artistic level, The Last Road succeeds, but a feature film is a three-legged stool and the narrative leg is broken on this one. It could have been a lot worse. It could have been pretentious or preachy or clichéd but it’s none of these. It’s not even dull or tedious, despite the vast running time. Frankly, if you’ve got a couple of hours to spare and a fondness for metaphysical afterlife fantasies, then I would recommend you check this out.

But does it work? Does it achieve its aims? Does it make the viewer think – about death, about morality, about redemption, about anything? Hand on heart, no it doesn’t. Sorry. I think the most clear indication of the film's lack of success in this respect concerns its attitude towards religion - which is that this attitude is unclear. For all his thuggery and general unpleasantness, Toby Thwaite evidently retains a stump of Christian upbringing and has no qualms about talking to God. Once he's dead, he is completely accepting of - and unsurprised by - the situation. There is talk in the film of Heaven and Hell. But... is this a Christian film? Has John Wheeler and/or Laurence Williams made it from a Christian perspective? Or does the movie simply use Christian tropes as allegory to make some greater point about existance and the human condition? Or is it even damning organised religion, showing that Toby's Christian beliefs haven't been enough to save him from eternity in a bleached-out Wiltshire? Who knows?

Don't get me wrong. I'm genuinely pleased that The Last Road avoids both the simplistic Biblical dogma of stuff like The Omega Code and also the infantile anti-religious dialectic found in pictures like Sacred Flesh or Hellraiser III. There is a middle ground, but that doesn't seem to be here either. I suppose we could put our own individual interpretations on the movie, but that's always a creative cop-out and I don't think that was the film-makers' intention. The trouble is: I don't know what their intention actually was.

Shot over 17 months in and around the town of Westbury, The Last Road was picked up by New York sales agency Striped Entertainment (who also have David Hutchison's Graders on their books) and was released through Vimeo VOD in June 2014 (with a 2012 copyright date). Although the nominal festival premiere was at the Eastern North Carolina Film Festival in September 2014, there was actually a version screened three years before that at the Portobello Film Festival in London in September 2011. Interestingly, the 2011 cut ran only 46 minutes which, in all honesty, is probably a more realistic run-time for this kind of movie.

MJS rating: B-

Director: Steve Lawson
Writer: Steve Lawson
Producer: Steve Lawson
Cast: Helen Crevel, Steve Dolton, Julian Boote
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: screener disc
Website: www.creativ-studios.com

It wouldn’t surprise me if Killer/Saurus sets some sort of new record for the lowest-budgeted film ever to feature a dinosaur. Consider the vast financial gulf between Jurassic Park and Carnosaur. Now take a second step down that ladder - or continue that line on the graph, if you prefer - and you’ll land somewhere around the level of Killer/Saurus, the latest opus from Leicestershire-based Creativ Studios.

But of course, as budgets come down over time, so the bang/buck ratio improves. While this movie has been shot on a shoestring, it has been shot with an eye for what a shoestring can do and how a shoestring can be used. A few coloured gels, a couple of cheap hazmat suits, a garage door and a smoke machine. In the right hands, and with the right approach, these can create an epic tale of science meddling with things that man was not meant to know. With a T rex in it.

Furthermore – and this is really important – this is an actual T rex. Well, not an actual one (though there is one just up the road from Creativ in the Geology Department at Leicester University) but an actual T rex prop. For everyone fed up with crappy CGI creature features, Killer/Saurus is a treat. Not a computer effect in sight. Just a good, old-fashioned puppet made to look a lot bigger and fiercer than it actually is. For such small mercies, the true dinofilm fan is always grateful.

That said, it should come as no surprise that, the DVD sleeve and associated publicity materials notwithstanding, you don’t actually see much of the dinosaur itself. But it is there.

Killer/Saurus reteams director Steve Lawson with actor Helen Crevel who impressed so much with her role in Survival Instinct. Here she is Kayleigh Ma, a scientist in the employ of a somewhat shady company doing unethical developments in bio-printing. This is a real thing, although nowhere as advanced as in this film (that said, a brief glimpse of a blog suggests this is set in the mid-2020s!). Essentially, bio-printing is similar to common or garden 3D printing except that it uses cells rather than plastic. The technology currently exists to manufacture undifferentiated tissue samples, but the ultimate goal is to be able to ‘print’ entire new organs or limbs for transplant.

This particular dodgy company however (which I don’t think is ever named) has got somehow sidetracked into using bio-printing to generate an entire living creature from scratch. And if you thought you might be able to create a living creature, what sort would you go for? Well, something small and simple to start with, probably. An earthworm, for example. Then maybe a fruit fly. Let’s say you have mastered invertebrates and want to try a higher form of life. You might try to create a frog, or a mouse.

Or you could just say the hell with it, cut out all those tedious incremental stages and go straight for tonight’s star prize: a fully grown Tyrannosaurus rex.

Remember that graph we were plotting of the budgets of Jurassic Park, Carnosaur and Killer/Saurus? I think a very similar line could be plotted for the loopiness of the three films’ plots. Killer/Saurus has a narrative which would make Roger Corman say, “Well, that seems a tad far-fetched and slightly insane.” But it is what it is.

In an epic ten-minute prologue, the 3D-laser-bio-printer-thing is set running behind a metal roller door, which then obviously has to be opened to see if the experiment worked. Not thought that through, have you Mr so-called Scientist? Kayleigh’s colleague Amy (a smashing performance from Vicki Glover, who previously encountered dinos in Ken Barker’s Bikini Girls vs Dinosaurs; she’s also in Cleaver, Gabriel Cushing and a Tuck Bushman short) volunteers to take a peek – and quickly regrets doing so. The door is closed and the whole project closed down. Sort of.

Kayleigh and Amy’s boss is Professor Peterson (Steven Dolton: Zombie Undead, Devil’s Tower, Nocturnal Activity) who has personal, non-dino-related reasons for wanting to develop this technology. He’s actually working for the mysterious Andrews (Dead Room alumnus Julian Boote, also in May I Kill U?, Deadtime and Evil Souls) whose ultimate goal is to progress beyond a T rex to something called a ‘Tier 2’ creation. What the hell is the next stage up from a T rex, you might wonder. You’ll get to see that right at the end of the film.

After the credits, the main plot kicks in three months later when Kayleigh returns to the research facility with her American journalist boyfriend Jed. (Kenton Hall, who plays Jed, is actually Canadian but has a quite extraordinary accent that sounds like he grew up in a little village on the Ireland/New Zealand border. Plus he has facial hair that looks like he couldn’t really decide whether he wanted a beard or not. His BHR credits include Amityville Asylum, Theatre of Fear and Valley of the Witch.)

Professor Peterson is still sitting in the same chair in the same office (and indeed wearing the same outfit), overseeing a now empty facility from a position of empty futility, like Captain Nemo in The Mysterious Island. There ensues a great deal of talking between the three, which bogs the film down somewhat, until we finally get a decent look at the T rex at about 45 minutes (the whole film runs a commendably taut 75 minutes, including about four minutes of end credits/blooper reel). Andrews himself subsequently turns up, accompanied by an armed ex-squaddie, simply credited as ‘Sergeant’ (Adam Collins, a genuine ex-squaddie whose stunt credits include Batman Begins and Allies). There’s yet more talking, the 3D-laser-bio-printer-thing is set running again and we finally get to see the ‘Tier 2’ creature, which is actually a commercially available horror mask bought (and licensed) from Illinois-based Zagone Studios.

In the end, the T rex is loose and, as is traditional, the whole place blows up. Well no, actually it doesn’t. I was expecting it to – but the film just sorts of ends, rather suddenly. Not having the budget to blow anything up, and not wanting to matte in a bunch of crappy CGI explosions, Steve has presumably left all that to our imagination. In the process, of course, he has left the way open for Killer/Saurus 2, should the market demand such a thing.

It should be obvious that Killer/Saurus is most certainly not a dino-on-the-rampage actionfest. Point of fact, it’s very talkie and it really could have done with something – anything – happening in the middle of the film that wasn’t just shot/reverse-shot of people talking under a blue light. Even if it was just some interstitial shots of the metal roller door shaking as something hurls itself against the other side, that would have served to keep things ticking over. (I say ‘middle of the film’ rather than ‘act 2’ deliberately. It’s difficult to identify a three-act structure when nearly 15% of your film is prologue. A clearer three-act structure might also have been beneficial.)

Thematically, in featuring the creation of a living creature – in toto, from scratch – this is a borderline Frankenstein film, and there is some brief discussion of how the creature has just appeared fully formed without birth or upbringing, though little is made of that. (Ooh, ooh, I just thought: Dinostein! That’s not been done. No, wait. Frankendino. No, Frankensaur. Oh well, something like that anyway. It’s bound to turn up sooner or later. Maybe I’ll write it if I get a moment. Shouldn’t take long. Anyway…)

Despite the lack of puppet-on-the-loose action, Killer/Saurus is a fun little sci-fi/horror picture with some appealing performances from its cast and a solid awareness of its limitations. It’s played completely straight when many such microbudget fancies would descend into silliness or spoofery. It is ridiculously over-ambitious and yet somehow manages to just about achieve those ambitions – and for that it is to be both commended and recommended.

The minimal crew was basically Creativ head honcho Steve Lawson with production assistants Lars Zivanovic (who previously worked with Steve on The Silencer) and Grace Coxall. Marc Hamill, director of The Wrong Floor, is one of the background techies in the prologue and also supplied some locations (specifically the staircases, Creativ Studios itself being a distinctly one-storey affair). Alex Young (Survival Instinct) supplied the original score, which is all pounding rhythms and approaching menace. Helen Crevel pulled double duty as the woman with her hand up inside Rexy the dinopuppet. Young Mr Lawson does an audio-Hitchcock as a telephone voice.

Shot in early 2015, Killer/Saurus is at time of writing pencilled in for a 6th July 2015 UK release through 88 Films (who get a thank you at the end, but didn’t fund the picture). Amazon currently lists the title as the oblique-free KillerSaurus but we shall see what it actually says on the sleeve when that’s made available.

MJS rating: B-

Director: Arjun Rose
Writer: Arjun Rose
Producers: Jo Podmore, Rhian Williams, Arjun Rose, Jason Maza
Cast: Tulisa off X-Factor, Reggie Yates off Radio 1, have you had enough yet?
Country: I’m ashamed to say, the UK
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: DVD
Website: www.facebook.com/DemonsNeverDie

Demons Never Die is absolute rubbish and gets worse the more you think about it. It was filmed as Suicide Kids but the title was changed at the last moment, allegedly because it couldn’t be said on radio and TV (possibly also because there was a 2009 American indie film called that). I’m guessing that there may also have been fears about what the media might do if any young person did top themselves after watching this movie, which could easily have happened. I certainly contemplated jumping out of a high window a few times. Of course the title change doesn’t alter the (for want of a better word) plot which is all about teenagers forming a suicide pact, so it wouldn’t have saved them anyway.

Actually, the title is the best thing here. Demons Never Die is a great title. Or at least it would be a great title for a horror film about, you know, demons. There is however nothing supernatural in this formulaic, lazy slasher - although a few red herrings point that way (for example, one character claims to have never seen another character’s constant companion). The ‘demons’ referred to in a clumsy voice-over near the start are of the metaphorical kind. I don’t know if that opening voice-over was added late in post-production, but the brief reprise at the end which finishes with the words “…and demons never die!” has so obviously been tacked on at the last moment that you can see the drawing pins.

This is a film about, and potentially for, Millennials (or “the Skins audience” as one of the sleeve quotes has it). It’s about a bunch of whining, self-important, self-obsessed teenagers who have nothing to worry about but like to complain anyway and feel the world owes them something just for getting out of bed. There isn’t a single likeable or empathetic character in the entire film. Why should anyone care what happens to these kids? These are characters who are so shallow (in both senses) that for most of them we only learn their names after they die.

At a sixth form college, the Principal announces that one of the students has killed herself, which is met with a startling lack of response from her disinterested peers. A couple of plain clothes policemen are there, one of whom warns the youngsters about the dangers of copycat suicides, something I’m sure would never happen in real life because the natural response of any troubled teen would be: “Well, I hadn’t really thought of topping myself, but now that you come to suggest it…”

Despite this warning, a second teenager also kills herself shortly afterwards, while attending some sort of never explained photoshoot, after recording an equally unexplained, random video diary saying she has bulimia. (There are frequent other random uses of video cameras throughout the script, to such an extent that I’m left wondering whether this was conceived as found footage in an earlier draft. There is also a single bizarre sequence when the characters all talk to each other via webcams, shown on screen as coloured blocks that look like a bad game of Tetris.) The bulimia remark is typical of the sort of brief, half-hearted infodumps which are intended to show that these teens have ‘demons’. Another one later in the film goes like this: “Why do you live in that squat?” “My dad kicked me out because I got a girl pregnant.” Seriously, a whole bunch of people thought this was a filmable script.

It transpires that both these girls (the first one’s ‘demon’ was apparently that she had split up with her boyfriend – Jesus, get over yourself!) were part of a suicide pact, along with eight other stereotypes (the stoner, the nutter, the fat kid, the sensitive Irish lad, the Token Black Guy…). Not one of these people shows any actual evidence of suicidal tendencies: there’s no nihilism, no punk attitude, not even any emo moping. They’re all just as bland and boring as most Millennial teenagers. What is wrong with the world? Sid Vicious and James Dean both died for your sins, and all you can do is text each other on your fucking Blackberries.

The remaining octet are mildly concerned that their two dead pals have jumped the gun on the whole 'suicide pact' thing, but we know that in fact they were murdered by a hooded psycho with a shiny metal mask. Almost immediately a major problem presents itself. Because among a veritable motorway pile-up of stupid and illogical plot points, the most fundamental is that this entire film relies on the police being unable to distinguish between self-inflicted stab wounds and wounds received during a frenzied knife attack. Frankly a child of ten would be able to tell the difference, but not these two clueless coppers. Mind, given that one of them is Ashley Walters from laughably shit rap combo So Solid Crew and the other is personality-free Radio 1 DJ Reggie Yates, it’s no real surprise that they don’t know the first thing about policing. Or anything. (Walters was also in Outcasts, Anuvahood and WAZ. Yates was also in Top of the Pops and Rastamouse.)

The third victim (Jennie Jacques: Truth or Dare, Cherry Tree Lane) is a tentative item with Sensitive Irish Lad (Robert Sheehan: Misfits, Nick Cage turkey Season of the Witch and Irish horror Ghostwood) so already marked as our Final Girl. She somehow evades the masked killer, but not everyone is convinced she saw someone because her mother has split personality syndrome (which the script is agonisingly careful to avoid calling schizophrenia) and she might have it too. Further bodies mount up, including a teacher and his wife/girlfriend. In the real world the school would be closed and a massive police operation would swing into place. But in the shoddily amateur writing of debutante film-maker Arjun Rose, everything carries on as normal. No-one seems perturbed by the spate of violent deaths or the threat of further killings, and the investigation remains limited to two coppers in one car.

The teacher, incidentally, is seen downing whiskey (possibly that’s his ‘demon’, though once again there’s neither context nor comment) and telling someone on the phone that he wants out of whatever they’re involved in. Out of what? Who was on the phone? Why is he drinking? Is he the killer, or involved with the killer? This is just one more random red herring that leads nowhere and means nothing, never either explained or justified. Maybe that actually is the killer on the phone, but if so what is the teacher’s involvement? We don’t know, and if Arjun Rose knows he’s too incompetent a writer to explain.

Some of the remaining, still alive youngsters decide that they maybe don’t want to commit suicide after all because… well, there’s no more reason for them to change their minds than to decide on hara-kiri in the first place. Rose has no concept of characterisation or motivation. It doesn’t help that some of the cast are shockingly wooden actors, but even talented performers couldn’t make this work. Remember Harrison Ford’s famous comment on the set of Star Wars? “You can write this stuff, George, but you sure as heck can’t say it.” Well, Arjun Rose can’t even write it.

It all culminates at a massive party in a huge house where dozens of vacuous teenagers drink and chatter and snog but the most actually rebellious thing they can manage is a game of Twister. The one psycho teen who organised the original pact (pointlessly shadowed everywhere by an acolyte with a video camera – see note above re. found footage origins) is now determined to murder everyone instead, using his dad’s gun. He’s played by Jason Maza (Rise of the Footsoldier, Ten Dead Men, Truth or Dare) who also produced this and a few other features (including BHR obscurity The Tapes). There’s a stultifyingly awful dialogue exchange where he explains to his camera-toting chum that this will make him a mass murderer, not a serial killer, complete with dictionary definitions of each. Added to an earlier exchange between Final Girl and Sensitive Irish Lad about character arcs, this overt textual analysis of horror film tropes within a horror film underlines that Rose has watched Scream and, well, that’s about it. He watched Scream and decided to copy it.

Rapper Cop and DJ Cop have been invited to the party because… plot. Not likely to compromise the investigation in any way, that. (This is a party, bear in mind, full of people who have lost several friends/associates to a violent serial killer and who are all potentially in danger themselves as students at the College of Death, yet are all too thick - or written by somebody too thick - to care.) The plain clothes cops now have, for some reason, police-branded jackets on. And fire-arms. Because yes, British police officers just habitually carry automatic pistols around with them when they’re out of uniform and attending a teenage party.

In the end [spoilers on] it turns out that the killer is one of the cops, which makes no more sense than anything else in the film. So let’s see: he murdered a random girl at a random school, somehow making it look like suicide. Then got assigned to that case. Then started attacking other spoilt-brat students, somehow working his way through the members of a secret pact of ‘suicide kids’ that he couldn’t possibly have known about. [spoilers off] Then, oh, my brain itches just trying to justify this. It can’t be justified. This is one of the worst, most insultingly stupid scripts ever filmed. First draft dialogue strung around a make-it-up-as-you-go-along story based on half-arsed ideas.

Arjun Rose is a former city trader who apparently decided he wanted to make films instead of shuffling money so roped in some of his rich friends to finance what is, in effect, a vanity project. Which is why the four executive producers include Idris Elba and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson. I can accept TPT wanting in; she’s just a posh totty socialite brain donor who knows no more about films than she does about work. But Idris Elba, man! He should know the difference between a good script and a pile of ill-thought-out clichés like this! He could be the black James Bond, for God’s sake! The other two ex.prods are Stephen Behrens (possibly the Morgan Stanley VP of that name) and Peter Delfgou, a former editor who now runs Soho Screening Rooms (not as naughty an establishment as it sounds!).

In interviews, Rose cited Donnie Darko as an influence on his script, and one can certainly see that, though only in the way that one can see Italian cuisine is an influence on a microwave lasagna. But here's something intriguing: I found another interview with Rose where he talked about having been inspired by an arty film called I Give You My Heart and it's clear from the description that he's actually talking about Tristan Versluis' 2008 short I Love You!

The cast - whose individual talents could be kindly described as 'varied' - is toplined by N-Dubz/X-Factor bimbo Tulisa Costacoffee, a piece of cynical stunt-casting mercifully killed off early on. Many of the real actors have worked with/for Noel Clarke in pictures like 4.3.2.1., Kidulthood and Adulthood. Among their notable credits: Jacob Anderson plays Grey Worm in Game of Thrones and was also in Comedown and Broadchurch; Emma Rigby was in Hollyoaks and Rentaghost spin-off Becoming Human; Andrew Ellis was in the various versions of This is England; Patrick Baladi played Dodi Al Fayed in a TV movie about Princess Diana; Jack Doolan was in May I Kill U?, The Facility and Cockneys vs Zombies; Nick Nevern was in The Tapes, Outpost: Black Sun and Strippers vs Werewolves; and Arnold Oceng used to be in Grange Hill. Most of the principle players - students and cops alike - were, not unexpectedly, in their twenties when they shot this. Hence the 'teenagers' look too old to be believable and the police look too young. Normally that would be a black mark but here it's the least of the film's worries.

Nathaniel Gleed, who has somehow previously played young versions of both Harry Hill and James May, plays a younger version of Sensitive Irish Lad in black and white flashbacks which, like everything else here, don’t make any sense. Rosalind Knight, whose career stretches all the way back to Carry On Nurse and Olivier’s Richard III, is in the cast apparently, but I don’t know where. And although I totally failed to spot her (probably because I wasn’t looking), comedy legend Morwenna Banks is in here somewhere too, probably as a teacher.

DP Toby Moore primarily works in television, shooting dramas such as Mr Selfridge and Law and Order UK (plus episodes of Torchwood and Young Dracula). Editor Tim Murrell cut Wake Wood, The Children, WAZ and The Day of the Triffids. Both put in fine work here which sadly can’t save the film itself from being crap on a stick. Likewise production designer Paul Burns (Piggy) and costume designer Robert Lever (Ra.One, The Tapes, Mirrormask). Possibly the only person who comes out of this shambles with anything to be genuinely proud of is Steadycam legend Roger Tooley whose work stands out on screen, especially in the title sequence as he moves around a lecture theatre. He’s not listed on the IMDB page and Rose managed to call him ‘Roger Avers’ in an interview.

Demons Never Die was shot over 18 days on a budget of £900,000. Rose called the film “real low budget” but just short of a million is obviously considerably more than most British horror films get and the results certainly don’t show up on screen. In fact, let’s just put that in context. Stag Hunt (almost entirely shot on location) cost £20,000. Blood and Carpet (packed with CGI post to remove 21st century background clutter) cost £3,000. Darkest Day and The House of Him cost £900 a pop. I’ve reviewed 15 new British horror features so far this year and only two might conceivably have had budgets anywhere near that of Demons Never Die. The total budgets of the other 13 films added together wouldn’t come to £900,000.

What the hell has Rose spent the money on? There are no big effects or action sequences, no costly locations, no expensive costumes or props, even the ‘gore effects’ are largely limited to throwing fake blood on fully clothed actors. For a man with a financial background, Arjun Rose (who was also one of four named producers) shows precious little evidence of how to manage money on a film production. He just knows how to raise money and then how to waste it, which I suppose is what you would expect from a city trader...

(Some sources cite a budget of '£90,000' so someone somewhere has either added or lost a zero, but even that is a hundred times what Rab Florence spent on The House of Him.)

Announced for a June 2011 cinema release under the original title, the film was promoted with a series of short-but-uninteresting videos in which various actor mates of Arjun Rose cited ‘3 reasons to live’. Retitled, the film was eventually released to theatres in late October - after a D-lister-packed West End premiere - and hit DVD the following February. I’m not aware of any festival play and frankly not surprised by that. The only other country where it seems to have been released so far is Turkey, for some reason.

Here’s the thing. It may seem like I have a problem with today’s young people, the so-called Millennials, the Skins audience. And indeed I do. But just because they’re boring and shallow, that’s no reason for people to make boring, shallow films about them. There has already been at least one perfectly good British horror film set within this generation of young people. Jon Wright’s terrific 2009 supernatural bully revenge saga Tormented is intelligent, well-crafted and even scary. So it’s not intrinsic that this sort of film is bound to suck. This is not a rubbish film because it’s about the youth of today. It’s a rubbish film and it’s about the youth of today.

It may be, as the quoted reviewer suggested, that 'the Skins audience' will indeed love it. I suppose we should draw a distinction between films about Millennials and films for Millennials. For someone with no imagination or perspective or ambition, who judges the quality of a film not on story or characters or evidence of creative talents but on how many people off the telly are in it, then maybe this picture is the business.

Speaking of things that suck, as we were, the film’s ghastly soundtrack (the licensing of which may account for quite a bit of that budget) is full of soulless, forgettable songs by soulless, forgettable artists like Jessie J, Chase and Status, Tinchie Stryder and Rizzle Kicks. If that’s your kind of music, then once again: you may enjoy this film.

Seriously? Jessie fucking J? What has become of the world?

MJS rating: D+

I interviewed Michael Riley by phone in June 2008 aboutVampire Diary. I think part of this may have been used for a feature in Fangoria. A few years later, I interviewed Michael again, this time aboutThe Seasoning House.

To what extent, in your opinion, is Vampire Diary a horror film and to what extent is it a gay romance?
"It’s more of a horror film than a gay romance. It was always intended as a drama that reveals how far people are willing to go once they find out that there’s a subculture that may or may not be fictional. Holly does fall in love with Vicki during the process but it’s not primarily a gay love story. It’s much more of a horror film with a romantic element to it."

Obviously there are a million straight-to-video lesbian vampire films out there but all the others are trashy soft porn, so was it tricky marketing this and explaining it to people who might make assumptions?
"Well yes, there’s the title as well and that genre does come with baggage. We were trying to do something a little bit more interesting than your straightforward, bodice-ripping, lesbian, get-your-tits-out kind of movie - which we’re totally set against. Obviously the style we shot it in has been done a bit as well. Since we made Vampire Diary, Cloverfield’s got a similar kind of vibe and Blair Witch and stuff. But we did try to steer clear from too many parallels with the cheesier element of the genre. At the same time, we’re playing with expectation that people have with that particular genre. I think this is a much more modern, much more hip take on that."

There seems to be a coming together this year of things like Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead and in fact in the UK you came out within a couple of weeks of The Zombie Diaries. Were you aware, when making it, that there was this increased use of the found footage genre?
"Not particularly. Obviously we were very aware of Blair Witch Project. But the story came first and it was always intended as a sort of documentary within a film. A lot to do with the fact that that was a nice way into the story, it suited the narrative - but also we could shoot it on a smaller budget. It allowed us a certain amount of freedom although, saying that, it is actually really hard to shoot something like that. It means you’re shooting very restricted angles. You can’t cut away to reaction
shots as you would normally do in a regular film for example. It’s totally dictated by who’s pointing the camera where.

"And also logistically it’s very difficult because you can’t hide your lights anywhere because you’re normally shooting 360 degrees. Actually it’s not a cheap way out. So we didn’t steal any ideas from anybody, we just felt that this was quite an interesting way to tell this particular story. We’re not doing that for the sequel, we’re doing it much more straightforward, I guess you’d call it conventional filming. So it’s not a documentary within a film for the second one."

What can you tell me about the sequel?
"We’re starting to develop it now. We’ve got a script. We’ve just shot a teaser for it, raising finance for it because the first one went down quite well, so we’re doing a second one. I’ve always complained that British producers and production companies don’t take advantage enough of successful first films and don’t make sequels. Where’s The Full Monty 2, for example? And obviously horror always lends itself to sequels and franchises and stuff. So we’re quite keen on doing a second one. We shot a teaser, as I said, for it recently down in a nuclear bunker in Essex. So it’s looking good. We’d like to get Anna Walton to reprise her Vicki role but obviously Anna’s going off to do great things at the moment so it might be tricky scheduling-wise."

I met her when I was down on Mutant Chronicles so if that takes off, that will raise her profile.
"Yes, but before that comes along Hellboy 2 is coming out soon and she’s got a big part in that. I think the premiere’s just happened or just about to happen. So her star is definitely ascending. She’s now taking the female lead in the new NBC multi-multi-million pound Crusoe TV series."

Ah, that’s being written by a mate of mine, Steve Gallagher.
"She plays Mrs Crusoe."

A character not heavily featured in the original book!
"No, not a character I recall l that much! So she’s really on the way up and we’re really pleased to have got her for the first one. Hopefully she’ll do the second one but if not we’ll recast. But certainly Vampire Diary 2 is definitely on the cards now."

So it’s still the character of Vicki?
"Yes. It won’t be a straightforward sequel. There are elements of the first one - the characters are in there - but it’s more of an Evil Dead 2: ‘inspired by’ rather than following or continuing from."

So presumably the first film, even though it’s not out in America yet, must have been successful where it has been released.
"Absolutely. It’s done well, it’s got some great reviews and people kind of get it I think. It’s gone down fantastically in Germany; there must be a quite large gothic scene there. It’s coming out in France soon, it did pretty well in the UK and as you say it’s coming out in the US. So for a tiny, tiny, minuscule budget, well-intended hip little movie it’s done quite well."

With the marketing and the festivals it’s playing, is it being aimed more at the horror crowd or gay audiences?
"It really depends which festival it’s going to. We’re kind of keen on not making it too much of a niche gay picture although it’s done well and played well in a lot of lesbian and gay film festivals. So while we’re not completely keeping it away from that particular area, it’s not something we’ll be concentrating on. I think it’s much more of a horror movie than it is a gay and lesbian picture."

How did the filming work between the two directors, Mark James and Phil O’Shea?
"The way they split it: Mark often dealt with cast much more on set, with the camera, the image and the editing; Phil, also cast but also overseeing script - he wrote it. So that’s the division if you want to talk to them about those areas."

One final quick question: in your opinion, is she or isn’t she a vampire?
"An interesting question! In my opinion - it’s not an opinion shared by the writer, by the way, she is not a vampire. She shows how a smart, intelligent, sexy woman can manipulate people into thinking certain things. And she gets away with it. There’s nothing, as far as I’m concerned, in the first one that says absolutely, unequivocally she’s a supernatural monster aka vampire. What she does is totally physical."

And we’ve only got her word for it about the whole 'pulling the teeth out' story.
"Exactly. But it’s interesting. I’ve done Q&As at film festivals and opinion is divided. Some people just buy into that she is completely monstrous and she drinks blood and she’s been alive for centuries and stuff - but others are more my way of thinking. What do you think?"

I think she isn’t but I think one of the film’s strengths is that it’s ambiguous. It’s kind of like whether Deckard’s a replicant or not.
"I guess so but there are two cuts of Blade Runner: one which makes it kind of explicit that he is and the other one is not explicit but he kind of is as well. But I think in Vampire Diary - there are no two cuts by the way - Vicki, for me anyway, she’s definitely not. But it does make it a bit more interesting that it’s ambiguous. Did you write a piece about this film and you were saying you weren’t sure whether Richard Stanley was in it or not?"

Yes, you confirmed this when we first exchanged e-mails.
"Me and Richard go a long way back. So yes, he is in it. Maybe he’ll be in the sequel but we’re not sure. But just to make it clear: he is the Spanish rapist."

website: www.sterlingpictures.com

I first interviewed Michael Riley in 2008 for a feature about Vampire Diary. Four years later, in February 2012, he producedThe Seasoning House, the directorial debut of Paul Hyett. While the film was shooting, Michael kindly agreed to another of my mini-interviews by e-mail.

Vampire Diary is one of the few British horror films of recent years that Paul Hyett didn’t work on, so how did the two of you first get together?
“We met on my feature which was a rites-of-passage drama entitled Boston Kickout in 1995. It had a great lead cast (including John Simm, Marc Warren and Andrew Lincoln) and we were all stranded in Stevenage during the filming there, going a little crazy. There was a scene in a rough old nightclub where one of the characters ‘glasses’ another. So Paul, who was just starting off in makeup prosthetics then, came along and designed a piece that fitted on the actor’s neck. It looked suitably disgusting and as I've got a leaning towards the macabre we got on like a house on fire.

“We share a similar taste in tastelessness. That and accuracy, straight-talking and sense of humour. Paul has a great sense of humour - I guess it's part of the job. When you're surrounded in blood and guts all day long (and Paul certainly does his research - his library is not for the faint-hearted) it helps to have a laugh sometimes. Since then we've worked on countless films together. He's my go-to man whenever special makeup fx are needed. Including Vampire Diary in fact. Paul's workshop designed and built the vampire baby for the birth at the end. Nice and stomach-churningly disgusting!”

Why is now the right time for this project, The Seasoning House, to happen?
“Paul has been considering making the leap to directing for a few years, and he's run a few ideas past me. A project called The Black Site was one that immediately interested me - a dark psychological thriller in the vein of Jacob's Ladder/Manchurian Candidate - and we have been developing that for some time. We shot a teaser/trailer for it recently and I'm starting to raise the budget for it. However it is a fairly sizeable budget for a first-time director and we both came to the conclusion that a smaller scale project would be easier to kick off with. So we batted a few ideas about, had some ideas suggested by others, and the story for The Seasoning House was born.

“Paul wrote it with his colleague Conal Palmer in a creative spurt relatively quickly and instinctively, and we raised the money via an Exec Production company called Temple Heart Films within a fairly short space of time. The quality of the script, my experience and the reputation that Paul has all played a big part in getting the film off the ground. But one of the main driving forces in getting it together has been a rebirth of audience appetite for intelligent and uncompromising horror films. Recent successes such as Frontiers, Martyrs and Inside have all marked a renaissance in smart, independent original storytelling in the horror genre. That all of those films are French inspired Paul and myself to drag that aesthetic over the channel and try it with an English sensibility.

“We're both sensitive to the fact that the backdrop to the story is similar to real events that occurred in the Balkan conflict in the ‘90s during which thousands lost their lives, but we've been careful to de-emphasise any national specifics, keeping it as neutral as we can, and suggesting that such events happen wherever there is conflict. There's no mention of place or time, and we treat all the victims of the events that take place in the house in an extremely respectful way. We're treading very carefully. But we're also keen to push audiences, not to solicit their goodwill, challenge them and make them squirm. It's time the UK made more films like this. Like our next project: The Black Site, similarly uncompromising and provocative.”

How did you assemble the cast for The Seasoning House?
“Our wonderful casting director Manuel Puro (with whom I've done a number of films) put together a perfect collection of actors for us to audition. The most challenging was the lead, Angel. She had to be very petite, young, resilient and of course a great actor. Paul and I met over 80 actresses during the process, and it was a happy day when Rosie Day walked into the room. She immediately understood the role, had extensive experience (she was the youngest actor to ever work with the Royal National Theatre) and she threw herself unquestioningly into the physical and emotional demands of the character to the extent that Paul and I knew we had found our Angel within just a few minutes.

“Sean Pertwee and Kevin Howarth were both friends of Paul's having worked with him and known him over the years. I believe Paul has killed Sean more times on screen than anyone else. And I've worked with Anna Walton quite a few times over the years, and she immediately picked up on the originality of the script and came on board. So it just happened that we have been surrounded in talented actors as well as friends in our cast, which made the production a joy to work on. Lots of laughs and goodwill amid the carnage.”

What logistical/practical problems are there in shooting a film where (a) the lead character is a deaf mute and (b) much of the action takes place in cramped, confined spaces?
“Rosie, who plays Angel - the deaf mute at the centre of the story - learned sign language for the role. And she trained with stunt co-ordinators for weeks before the film's commencement, delivering a powerful and committed performance unlike any other. The fact that she can't hear what is going on around her massively increases the drama and tension for her and the audience.

“We shot the film in a vast, abandoned former RAF base in the west of London. Given the constraints of the film this worked out to be perfect for us as 100% of our locations were to be found there - from cottages, empty streets, woods and industrial buildings, to the Seasoning House itself. About two thirds of the film takes place in and around the house, so it was essential that the design be both eye-catching and practical at the same time.

“The wonderful art direction team (headed by the awesome Caroline Story) completely took over a large building, a former children's clinic, and transformed it into the chilling, decrepit house you'll see in the film with the incredibly talented DoP Adam Etherington bringing a truly beautiful and grim atmosphere in his photography. Not wanting to give away too many secrets ahead of time, I won't go into too many details as to how we achieved the big set-pieces in the film, but you can be sure that the film breaks totally new ground in bloody action, tension and horror.”

With this film, the just-out Deviation, the forthcoming Scar Tissue and the on-the-way Zombie Apocalypse your CV is suddenly full of horror movies - what can you tell me about these various projects?
“Although I haven't made that many horror films, I've always been an admirer of the genre. For some reason I grew up being a huge fan of Lucio Fulci. Must have been the boredom of growing up in suburban Nottingham, but something about those movies sparked my imagination. I must have seen Zombie Flesheaters 20+ times before I was 16. Any scene featuring a topless girl being attacked by a shark who in turn is attacked by an underwater zombie has profound effects on a young boy! No CGI either - it was all shot for real. I have a collection of UK quads including many of Fulci's classics from that time (The Beyond, House by the Cemetery, City of the Living Dead etc) and when I met him in the late ‘80s he was a smart, funny and shrewd influence on me.

“But my tastes are pretty wide-ranging and it's perhaps because of that that I look for the unusual and unexpected in the genre. I'm not so interested in typical slasher films or monster movies, more in the original and boundary-pushing. I hope all my forthcoming projects can be described a little like that. It's not easy getting films off the ground in the UK, especially films that can find an audience and turn a profit. Anyone can borrow a 5D and a laptop with FCP, but it's the script that counts ultimately. And they're not so easy to find.”

Website: www.sterlingpictures.com

Director: Edward Evers-Swindell
Writers: Ross Evison, Stuart Fletcher
Producers: Sian Williams, Stuart Fletcher
Cast: Ross Evison, Susan Riley, Paul Sutherland
Country: UK
Year of release: 2005
Reviewed from:UK DVD (Blackhorse Entertainment)

To really enjoy Ed Evers-Swindell’s debut feature Infestation, one should have both a tolerance for ultra-low budget film-making and a fondness for generic British zombie films. Who has both of those qualities in spades, also two thumbs and speaks French?

C’est moi!

Under normal circumstances, this would be a routine and unexceptional entry in the British Horror Revival (and its wholly owned subsidiary the British Zombie Boom), distinguishable only by its impressively early production date – shooting began in late 2000 – and a sci-fi first act which gives every impression of being a completely different movie. But circumstances are not normal, because of the possible appearance on this disc of a very unexpected individual – and I’m not talking about the trailer for obscure gangster drama Rulers and Dealers which features (“And introducing…”) a pre-Tardis Freema Agyeman.

Fact: of all the NuWho companions, Martha Jones was easily (a) the best, and (b) the hottest. Challenge this assertion at your peril. The other unskippable trailers here include Ross Boyask’s Left for Dead (a film on which Ed Evers-Swindell gets a ‘thank you’ credit, apparently) and The Silencer, directed by and starring an absurdly young-looking Steve Lawson. Anyway…

Infestation starts with some captions explaining that a deadly virus epidemic broke out in 2009 (you may recall that – it was in all the papers) and that two years later the surviving human race retreated to a vast underground city, Subtropolis. Now it’s 2034 and a terrorist group is causing trouble - for reasons that are unclear. Our main characters are two Subtropolis security guards, Loki (co-writer Ross Evison, now a freelance trailer editor in New York) and Sash (Susan Riley), who are on patrol when they surprise a squad of terrorists up to no good. Much violence ensues, both fist- and firearm-based, in a sequence which is cut together too fast to see what is actually happening (a common mistake, even in many big budget productions). This was filmed in the ventilation system of the Mersey Tunnel, an impressive, suitably industrial-looking location but one which the film-makers were unable to sully with fake blood. Hence we have the somewhat ridiculous sight of a person being riddled with bullets while standing in front of a white-tiled wall which remains pristine throughout.

One of the terrorists escapes, Loki gives chase and they both jump into flying machines which look like stubby X-wings, only without the wings. These two cheap CGI vehicles hurtle at speed through a cheap CGI city. Underground.

Let’s just pause the tape there, because the whole Subtropolis thing is nonsensical with a capital daft. Quite apart from having been constructed in just two years, this is an ‘underground city’ not in the sensible way of being a vast network of tunnels, but in the sense of being a single, vast cavern full of tower-blocks. Hence people travel everywhere in flying cars, as we shall all assuredly do in two decades’ time. There’s no suggestion of how Subtropolis functions as a city, except that it is ruled by a militaristic individual ironically named Commander Freeman (Malcom Raeburn: lots of TV work since the 1970s including Juliet Bravo, Corrie, Fairly Secret Army, The Bill etc; used to mostly play policemen, now mostly plays doctors and vicars ). Little things like how any such underground society would actually produce food are simply scooted over.

But not to worry because, by the end of Act 1, the city and the flying cars and the terrorist group will all have vanished from the story. Basically, the terrorist crashes and kills a load of people; Loki takes the blame and resigns. Six months later, Commander Freeman asks Sash (for some reason) to go on a mission to the surface and she agrees on the condition that she can also take Loki, who is by now a sad sack sanitation worker. The duo join a squad consisting of efficient Sergeant Svelder (Pete Farrar, later a contestant on reality TV series Survivor), hulking ‘Mad Dog’ Maddox (executive producer Paul Sutherland), spiky Gibson (Perveen Hussain, now a jobbing actress with bit parts in the likes of Shameless and Corrie) and techie geek Cole (Evers-Swindell’s brother William). They are blasted up to the surface in a rocket-powered capsule travelling through a never-explained ventilation shaft (hang on, haven’t we already established that the air up there is potentially deadly because of the virus?). Some arbitrary tension is generated by the ventilation shaft having a door that opens and closes at set times, unchangeable by the techies down in Subtropolis control. Will they make it in time, even with a malfunctioning booster? Well, if they don’t it’s going to be a short movie.

Up top, after a quick trek across a quarry on Anglesey which also featured in a Mortal Kombat film, the six squaddies arrive at a collection of derelict buildings. This is (or was) Tower Beach Prestatyn, the only holiday camp ever built and run by Thomas Cook Ltd. Pontins took over the place in the 1970s and it closed in 1985, after which it was used by the police for riot training (hence, presumably, the large number of smashed windows). A number of other productions shot there, notably 1990s post-apocalypse TV series The Last Train, before Ed and his merry band arrived. Principal photography on Infestation ran for two weeks in February 2001, literally finishing a few days before the camp was demolished (it’s now a housing estate).

So, leaving aside all the basically irrelevant sci-fi hokum and Sega graphics of the first act, the set-up is thus: a previous expedition to the surface are all believed to be dead, but their transponder-things show them as still moving around. Svelder’s squad inject themselves with a serum which will give them 24 hours’ resistance to the deadly airborne virus. They then have to locate the previous team and find their way to something unclear which will get them back home, except that seems unlikely and they all know this is potentially a suicide mission.

Just over halfway through, we finally get our first look at the zombies as a couple of them lurch at our heroes. This follows a tense build-up clearly modelled on the legendary three-metres-that’s-in-the-room scene from Aliens and the original intention was that the zombies would burst up from the floor. That not being possible, they just walk through a doorway which is – how to put this? – less effective. That said, when one of the characters falls prey to the zombies there is a very cool, full-on, Dawn of the Dead style gut-munching scene.

After this, it all becomes pretty much standard fare with the undead (or rather, virus-infected) hoards picking off our heroes one by one. Who will survive and what, like the man says, will become of them? Eventually, good old Loki locates an entrance to some sort of underground hangar from where he launches another cheap CGI flying machine, rescues his surviving comrades and then heads back down into the bowels of the Earth, having discovered the (frankly rather dull) truth about the virus.

You’ve seen worse zombie films than this (or at least, I have) and you’ve certainly seen better. The whole thing has a very cheap, video look with almost every scene tinted some colour or other. The acting is not bad. Evison has a slightly gormless look which effectively belies the character’s savvy and fighting ability. There’s some good character conflict, especially between Sash and Maddox, and a not unreasonable sequence of narrative events. Evers-Swindell makes the most of his locations and uses tight shots and small sets for other scenes, such as inside the aircraft. The UK disc comes with an enjoyably self-deprecating and honest commentary by the director.

Eventually completed in 2004, Infestation made its debut at the 2005 Cannes Film Market and premiered on Italian DVD in August that year (with sleeve blurb moving the events to 2080). There was a Japanese disc in February 2007 (with, as you might expect, a freaking awesome sleeve) and a UK release a few months later plus assorted releases in other territories including Portugal and Australia. Actually, I must just note my surprise that the copy I bought off eBay had ‘For rental only’ emblazoned on the sleeve. Checking Amazon I find that there was indeed a rental disc released on 12th November and a sell-through disc three weeks after. I honestly had no idea that the concept of a rental window still existed that late. What was the point? Was anyone so desperate to see this indie obscurity that they couldn’t wait for sell-through?

The only press coverage I’m aware of was a review in SFX which accused this 2001-produced film of ripping off The Core (2003) and Serenity (2005). Sigh. Also of note is that the sleeve (and hence the Amazon page) proudly displays the BBFC symbol for an ‘18’ rating when in fact Infestation was passed uncut as a 15. And frankly it probably only just scraped that, it’s more of a 12.

In historical terms, this could have been the first serious, traditional British zombie feature if it had been released swiftly, preceded only by Andrew Parkinson’s very atypical I, Zombie, the cheap splatter comedy of Zombie Toxin/Homebrew and an early, self-released effort from the indefatigable Jonathan Ash. Plus a few shorts but really not many. So although Infection seems – heck, is – thoroughly generic and formulaic, that’s only because when it eventually emerged from post-production (that CGI may be cheap-looking but it still takes time) the genre and the formula had already established themselves in the meantime.

So why is this film interesting? It’s because of Mr Neil Marshall. There is a quote from him front and centre on the UK sleeve (reading, in full: “Awesome!”). Ed Evers-Swindell worked in the sound department on The Descent, providing all the ‘voices’ of the Crawlers, and he is also credited as ‘script consultant’ on The Descent Part 2. As I type this he is deep in post on his long-awaited second feature Dark Signal, which is being executive produced by Marshall.

The executive producer on Infestation was Paul Sutherland, the actor who played ‘Mad Dog’ Maddox. And here’s the really spooky part: he looks exactly like Neil Marshall! The bald head, the little beard, same height, same build, northern accent. Surely – I thought, as I watched the film – surely that is a young, unknown Mr N Marshall who has subsequently asked for his dual contribution to be disguised by an alias. Otherwise, we have to believe that Ed Evers-Swindell, a known associate of Neil Marshall, has made two feature films, executive produced by two different men who look like twins!

But is it really Neil Marshall? Let’s apply scientific procedure to this. What evidence do we have that it’s not Marshall? Certainly neither he nor Ed nor anyone else has ever mentioned this acting gig. But of course absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Slightly more concerning is that the February 2001 shoot for Infestation was literally a month before principal photography began on Dog Soldiers, when Neil Marshall should have been working all hours God sends on last-minute pre-production for his own debut feature.

Here, I think, is the clincher. Infestation is a co-production between three companies. Racing Snake Films was Ed and Will Evers-Swindell’s production company. Fierce Productions was co-writer/producer Stuart Fletcher (although the name has now been adopted by an unrelated company in London). But the main prodco was ESP Pictures Ltd, and a quick check of the company details reveals that the three directors of that were Ed Evers-Swindell, Sian Williams (the other producer) and… Paul Andrew Sutherland. Hence the name: ‘ESP’ for Ed, Sian and Paul.

Which means that Paul Sutherland is a real person. So, unless ‘Neil Marshall’ is an alias, these are two different people, and my surprise at discovering a low-budget zombie film secretly starring one of the biggest names in British horror is dashed. Would have been cool, though. And the matter is slightly confused by Sutherland being credited as both (sole) producer and co-producer on the British Council’s listing for the film, and being misnamed ‘John Sutherland’ elsewhere.  And you must admit, only their mother can tell them apart.

Plus, while I was writing this review, someone alerted me to the fact that there is a British horror film with Neil Marshall on screen, acting under a fake name. So you know, it wasn’t such a crazy idea. But to be absolutely certain, I contacted Ed himself who assured me: “I can confirm that Neil Marshall and Paul Sutherland are two very different and separate people. In fact, if you get them in a room together they don't actually look very similar...but I have heard people mistake them in the past.”

Edward Evers-Swindell is part of a surprisingly extensive Evers-Swindell clan of unclear relationship to one another, spread between North Wales and New Zealand. As well as brother Will (who is composing the music for Dark Signal) there’s Nico, a jobbing actor who was in several episodes of Grimm and played Prince William in a 2011 TV movie; Laura (assorted production gigs); Katherine (hair and make-up on 2010 violent revenge thriller Dark Waters); and identical twins Georgina and Caroline (a rowing team who won Olympic Gold for New Zealand at Athens and Beijing!). Ed and Katherine were both involved (as editor and actor respectively) with Karen Bird’s Expiry Date, a BHR film so obscure it makes Infestation look like a top pick on Netflix. According to the Inaccurate Movie Database, Ed also received a ‘thank you’ on Wraith Island, an even more obscure BHR film than Expiry Date (filmed in 2009, possibly never completed and directed by either Sioned Page or Marc Brimfield, depending on your source).

The ‘special make-up FX’ on Infestation were jointly handled by Amber Smit (who later got a credit in the wardrobe department of The Phantom Menace), Wendy Couling (now a professional artist) and Cathy Griffiths. ‘Special FX supervisor’ Andrew Whitehurst has gone on to an impressive career, working at the Framestore and Double Negative, amassing credits on the likes of Skyfall, Scott Pilgrim and assorted Harry Potters. Richard Blackburn and Philip Creed are credited with ‘special gun FX’; they also shared editing duties with Ed and both subsequently played zombies in Colin! ‘Screen FX’ (which I assume means the various computer displays on show) are credited to Andy Harding of Paintbox Studios.

There’s no credited DP but Ed is listed as camera operator (the camera in question being his dad’s, purchased from Curry’s, hence the ‘home video’ look) with Stuart Fletcher responsible for lighting. Neil Ratcliffe did the titles which, in the manner of such things, are one of the best parts of the movie. Someone or something called Emissary provided the music.

Aside from the principals, the cast included Evison’s brother Simon as a survivor from the first expedition, and Matt Routledge who subsequently wrote, directed, produced and starred in legendary action comedy Mersey Cop (he also DPed Angie Bojtler’s unreleased BHR feature Jacob’s Hammer).

As for Edward Evers-Swindell himself, he started making super-8 films as a kid, set up a film-making club at school and then began serious production at university where his graduation film was a shorter version of Infestation. This feature, his magnum opus (until now), cost a whopping £5,000 all-in. In 2015 as I type he is deep in post on his second feature Dark Signal, executive produced (as noted) by Neil Marshall. Ed tells me that both Neil and Paul Sutherland were offered cameos but neither could make it, meaning we still haven’t seen the two of them in the same place at the same time…

MJS rating: C

Director: Ross Boyask
Writer: Chris Regan
Producer: Phil Hobden
Cast: Brendan Carr, Doug Bradley, John Rackham
Country: UK
Year of release: 2008
Reviewed from: screener

Ten Dead Men (or 10 Dead Men as the US distributor insists on calling it) is a brutal, violent film in which unpleasant people hurt each other very badly. It is also skilfully crafted and adroitly directed with some excellent performances and a thoroughly professional look.

Like the previous feature from director Ross Boyask and producer Phil Hobden, Left for Dead, this is a gangland revenge tale in which a bloke who makes his living by hurting and killing people decides to give it all up and settle down, only to find that his bosses want to punish him by, ah, hurting and possibly killing him. So he goes away then comes back and, ah, hurts and kills them. The morality of the central character is distinctly dubious but then it must perforce be in any gangster film.

Certainly, Boyask and Hobden’s films don’t glamourise the lifestyle like studio produced gangster films do. These characters are unpleasant men living miserable, unhappy lives. But whereas Left for Dead was borderline fantasy and devoted most of its action to fancy kickboxing, Ten Dead Men is much dirtier and more realistic. There are a few spin-kicks towards the end but you certainly couldn’t call this a martial arts picture. Last time I checked, slamming someone’s head repeatedly into the floor was not actually a martial art.

Brendan Carr (who played a ‘spectacular warrior’ in Intergalactic Combat) stars as Ryan who has actually left all that and settled down with a wife and a mortgage. But he finds himself pulled back into the darkness and shortly afterwards, mob boss Hart (Terry Stone: Doghouse, Jack Said, Kung Fu Flid) has Ryan executed after first forcing him to watch the murder of his wife Amy (some excellent, terrified acting from ex-EastEnder Pooja Shah). Ryan’s bullet-riddled body is wrapped up and thrown into the sea but somehow... somehow... he survives and makes it back to the beach.

This is the closest that the film gets to the not-quite-realism of its predecessor. Although I did wonder at some points whether this whole thing was flashing through Ryan’s brain in one second as the bullets take his life away, I think that ultimately we just have to accept that somehow... somehow... he has survived.

So actually, Left for Dead would have been just as good a title here. Possibly even more apposite. But the Modern Life? team had already used it once.

What follows is basically a sequence of revenge killings on the ten men who were directly involved, in one way or another, in the death of Amy and the pseudo-death of Ryan. These include professional cage-fighter Bruiser (Tom Gerald), pathetic body-disposer Axel (John Rackham, writer-director of Bloodmyth), compulsive gambler Harris (Lee Latchford-Evans, formerly of ghastly plastic pop combo Steps!), corrupt cop Detective Inspector Keller (Ben Shockley) and the closest thing that the film gets to comic relief: a bickering couple named Parker and Garrett (JC Mac and Jason Lee Hyde, both in Stagknight) who are probably gay although this is never explicitly stated. There is also a smartly-dressed, sinister sadist simply called the Projects Manager (Keith Eyles, who played the father in Ross Shepherd’s award-winning short Kingdom of Shadows) who becomes the main villain, Hart himself keeping well out of the way of any actual violence.

Obviously that’s not ten men but the others such as Stone (producer ‘PL’ Hobden) aren’t as clearly defined and seem like rather interchangeable, shaven-head thugs. The film’s website has brief character bios which mention, for example, that Stone is Hart’s nephew but this is never stated in the film.

All this would be a frankly tedious sequence of one fight after another - simultaneously violent and picaresque - if the film was told in chronological order. But where the script by Brighton-based Chris Regan (Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw), working from Boyask and Hobden’s story, works brilliantly is in chopping up the tale and mixing it with slices of earlier events so that we only learn why this is happening as we’re watching it happen. Cause and effect bundled together into one remarkably coherent and logical plot.

Not that the viewer could necessarily work out precisely what is going on without a little help. Hence the drily detached narration by Doug Bradley - which at first seems, as narration invariably does, tacked-on and gratuitous. As the film progresses, as we start to realise which bits of the story happened before or after other bits (including, later, some bits which we saw out of context at the start), Bradley’s narration becomes not only worthwhile but indispensable.

Ten Dead Men eschews the voyeuristic glee of so many gangster films in favour of powerful character conflict and fights which, though realistic, remain watchable and serve a narrative purpose. It is an imaginative, well-crafted British gangster thriller which, if there was any logic in the world, would have had a theatrical release instead of whatever tedious, inferior reworking of Lock, Stock Guy Ritchie has churned out this month.

Also in the generally very fine cast are Jason Maza, Silvio Simac (Transporter 3, Intergalactic Combat), Adrian Foiadelli, Cecily Fay (who was inside the TV series Marvin costume in the awful Hitchhiker’s Guide movie) and Glenn Salvage (The Silencer). Many of the cast were in Left for Dead and/or Boyask’s earlier film fIXers; quite a few were in Bloodmyth and/or Rise of the Footsoldier.

Scott Benzie (Soul Searcher, Room 36) provides the score. The cinematographer was Darren Berry and Ross Boyask did his own editing. The very busy stunt co-ordinator was Jude Poyer (Stag Night of the Dead, Beyond the Rave) whose early work in Hong Kong includes the likes of Star Runner and Gen-Y Cops.

The rather impressive UK DVD of Ten Dead Men includes ten deleted/alternate scenes, a 55-minute Making Of, two commentaries, sundry other behind-the-scenes bits, a brace of trailers and a 30-page spin-off comicbook entitled Ten Dead Men: The Last Job.

Not just another British gangster film, Ten Dead Men is proof that there is life in the genre yet, despite the paucity of imagination which normally infects these films.

MJS rating: A-

Directors: Steve Lawson, Simon Wyndham
Writer: Steve Lawson
Producers: Steve Lawson, Simon Wyndham
Cast: Glenn Salvage, Maye Choo, Clive Ward
Year of release: 2006
Country: UK
Reviewed from: DVD screener

The latest feature from Steve Lawson (Insiders) is a taut, exciting, polished piece of action film-making with engrossing characters, a cohesive storyline and well-edited, kick-arse fights. I’m not sure you can ask for much more than that.

Glenn Salvage (Left for Dead, Underground, Ten Dead Men) stars as Michael Eastman, one third of an anti-narcotics team which aims to catch local gangster Sirrus Rooke (Clive Ward: Insiders) in the act of dealing drugs. The bust must be timed to the second - so where are Eastman’s colleagues Chris (Chris Jones: Soul Searcher) and Richard (writer-director-producer Steve Lawson) when the moment comes?

Well, it transpires that they’re both as crooked as a nine-bob note and hoping that Rooke’s goons will dispose of the honest 33 per cent of their team before he finds out what is going on. However, though thoroughly shot up and left for dead, Eastman survives - sort of. A doctor (Vimal Stephens: Animals) explains the situation to him, when he is ready to leave hospital some time later. He cannot speak - vocal chords shot to hell; he cannot feel pain - which is handy in a fight but means he can’t tell if he is seriously injured; and although he can walk, one solid thump to his lower back will leave him paralysed.

Returning home, Eastman finds that his wife Lily (Maye Choo: Silent Witness, Blood Ties) has now shacked up with Richard. His boss Ginty (Jim Clossick) finds him a grotty bedsit and provides a phone which he can use to text people. Ginty and Richard both do their best to make Eastman feel guilty, assuring him that it was his timing that was off and he was responsible for screwing up their only chance of nailing Rooke.

But Eastman is determined to get to the bottom of all this, to find out who set him up and why. He pulls on his leathers and his helmet, gets on his motorbike and before you know it he’s a subway vigilante. Small-time dealer Danny (Kevin Gash) and his thugs are getting ready to rape a Chinese girl (Christine Yung) when a mysterious, silent figure turns up and kicks seven shades of shit out of them. With its symmetrical framing and helmet-wearing vengeance dealer, this scene is basically what The Wraith would have looked like if Stanley Kubrick had directed it.

Writing and editing keep the film tight and to the point (75 minutes). It’s a clever and well-crafted take on the mysterious vigilante subgenre which could so easily have descended into sub-Batman exaggeration but instead stays rooted in the real world of thugs, dealers and bent coppers. Great fight direction (mostly by Simon Wyndham, one scene by Chris Jones) and remarkably accomplished cinematography (also by Wyndham) combine to make the film look much, much better than its budget suggests it should.

The downside is that some of the acting is, frankly, no great shakes (you might think I’m one to talk if you’ve seen my brief role in Insiders). There’s a lot of aggression and threat in the dialogue which is diluted by performances that often don’t seem aggressive or threatening enough. Perhaps the unavailable luxury of rehearsal time or even workshopping would have helped. A notable exception is Salvage who turns in a terrific performance despite - or perhaps because of - his lack of dialogue, and Choo is remarkably good too.

That said, the fights go some way towards making up for the talkie bits. Low-budget martial arts pictures can often look like, at best, home-made training videos but the action sequences in The Silencer are extraordinarily professional in both choreography and camera-work.

This is a distinct step-up from Insiders in almost every department. It’s an excellent low-budget martial arts picture, completely independent and 100 per cent British. Well done to all concerned.

MJS rating: A-

Director: Kenton Hall
Writer: Kenton Hall
Producers: Kenton Hall, Alexzandra Jackson
Cast: Scarlet Hall, Hero Hall, Kenton Hall
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: http://dozensummersmovie.co.uk

I so rarely get to watch kids’ movies nowadays. Well, except for the latest Pixar or Blue Sky summer tentpole with TF Simpson. Most of what I watch is microbudget indies, and not many people make microbudget indie children’s films. So hooray for A Dozen Summers, a charming and fun kids' picture that adults will also enjoy, shot around my home town of Leicester and currently on the festival circuit.

Written and directed by Kenton Hall from KillerSaurus, the film stars his own 12-year-old twin daughters Hero and Scarlet Hall as Maisie and Daisy McCormack. Kenton himself (without the facial hair and with a more obviously Irish accent) plays the twins’ father Henry, an eccentric author separated from their advertising model mother Jacqueline (Canadian script supervisor turned actress Sarah Warren).

A Dozen Summers is a divertissement, a lightweight musing on the highs and lows of the tween years: too old to be a little kid, not yet a teenager. Crushes, bullies, teachers, parents, bicycles, shops: these are the elements of a 12-year-old’s life and many conventional film-makers would have aimed for some sort of artistic or meaningful statement, which would have been praised by the critics and ignored by everyone else. Kenton Hall's take on matters is more prosaic than pretentious and therein lies is strength (and watchability). A gently wry humour permeates the entire film; you can't take life seriously when you're twelve and making a movie about yourself.

The distinctive schtick of A Dozen Summers is its playful self-referentiality. Maisie and Daisy, finding themselves in a film, take the opportunity to make a film about their lives, using jump-cuts, flashbacks, fantasy sequences and other cinematic conventions. The camera becomes a character, though there is no camera-man or any other actual physical crew. Interestingly, where many self-referential films would have characters address the audience directly, via the camera, here it is the camera itself which they address, an intangible (but noticeable to other people) eye into their world.

Though told from the view of a 12-year-old, this is of course an adult’s view of the view of a 12-year-old and Kenton Hall is not afraid to include references or sequences that no schoolkid is going to understand (most notably a black and white, subtitled Seventh Seal parody). There are also werewolf and ghost gags to keep indie film fans happy. Nevertheless, the script and direction ensure that the film remains solidly in the children’s world, even in scenes which feature only adults. This is a 12-year-old’s view of adults (“Parents are weird.”) – though it is of course, technically, an adult’s view of a 12-year-old’s view of adults.

It would be churlish to criticise a film this sweet and open, like kicking a puppy. Naturally among a cast of children with varying levels of experience, the actual quality of the acting also varies. Some are excellent, others are giving it their best, bless ‘em, and in a sense the occasional wooden performance gives the film a grounding in realism that helps to distinguish it from Hollywood pablum or pretentious indie cack.


A Dozen Summers is a bit like the city of Leicester itself: not big-headed, not overblown, but a good, solid, down-the-line, get-what-you-pay-for British city with a population proud of their home, not because they believe it’s better than everywhere else, but because they know it’s a generally great place for them and their families, with the good outweighing the bad, and that’s all you can ask for in this day and age. Canuck ex-pat Kenton Hall may not be a native of Leicester, but he has made a very Leicester film.

The young cast includes local star Holly Jacobson (Suckablood, Bloodline) as a diminutive, psychotic school bully (her dad Ben has a couple of technical credits), Quinton Nyrienda (Assan in Young Dracula) as a love interest and David Knight (Ned in Hetty Feather) as the token boy in the twins' gang.

Among the adults, Tallulah Sheffield (bit parts in Jekyll and Dorian Gray) and Kieron Attwood (Unearthing Evil) are teachers, Ewen MacIntosh (K-Shop, The Office and Jaime Winstone fantasy pilot Beast Hunters) is a shopkeeper, and former Time Lord Colin Baker (also in Rhys Davies’ Leicester-set short Finding Richard, which shares numerous cast and crew with this film) provides top-and-tail narration.

A Dozen Summers is something different, something light and fun but imaginative and surprisingly resonant. Just like your twelfth summer, it is ephemeral and will be gone before you know it - so see it if you have the chance.

MJS rating: A-